Midwestburg’s workers. The coming of the interurban trolley, which
brought Boone Lake Beach within half an hour of the city, had turned
these woods into a dead loss as far as local pleasure seekers were
concerned. The benches had been split up or stolen or had rotted. The
trim central patch of green sward had been left to grow successive
unmown harvests of ragweed.
The dancing platform, with its once-smooth floor and the bright-painted
lattice which ran around its base, was sharing the fate of the rest of
the grove. The floor was sunken and holey. The laths of the lattice had
fallen away in one or two places, and everywhere they had been washed
free of their former gay paint.
Bobby’s aimless course took him past one end of the platform, as soon as
he discovered it was harmless and deserted. A furtive sidelong glance,
midway of the latticed stretch, showed him a weed-masked hole some two
feet square, where the laths had been ripped away or had been kicked in.
The sight awoke vague submemories, centuries old, in the artificially
reared pup. Thus had his wolf forbears seen, and explored for den
purposes, gaps between rocks or under windfalls. Bobby, moving with
scared caution, crept up to the opening, sniffed its musty interior;
and, step by step, ventured in under the platform.
Here it was still bitter cold; yet it was sensibly warmer than in the
open. And, year after year, dead leaves had been wind-drifted through
the gap. Riffles of them lay ankle deep near the entrance. Down into the
thickest of the riffles the wretched puppy wiggled his shivering way.
There he lay, still shaking, but gaining what scant comfort he might
from the warmth of the leaves beneath and around him.
Presently from sheer nervous fatigue he snoozed.
It was past midnight when Bobby awoke. He was awakened less by cold than
by ravening hunger. His was not the normal increase of appetite that had
come upon him at such times as the Lochinvar kennel men had been an hour
or so late with his dinner. This was the first phase of famine.
Fear and discomfort had robbed him of hunger throughout the train
journey. But now he was safe away from the strangers who had seemed to
menace his every move; and he had had a few hours of sleep to knit his
frayed nerves. He was more than hungry. He was famished. All his nature
cried out for food.
Now, never in his brief life had Lochinvar Bobby found his own meals.
Never had he so much as caught a mouse or rifled a garbage pail. In
sanitary man-made kennel run and hutch had he passed all his time. Not
his had been the human companionship which sharpens a collie’s brain as
much as does stark need. And he had no experience of food, save that
which had been served him in a tin dish. He did not know that food grows
in any other form or place.
But here was no tin dish heaped with scientifically balanced, if
uninspired, rations. Here was no manner of food at all. Bobby nosed
about among the dead leaves and the mould of his new-found den. Nothing
was there which his sense of smell recognised as edible. And goaded by
the scourge of hunger he ventured out again into the night. The wind had
dropped. But the cold had only intensified; and a light snow was still
sifting down.
Bobby stood and sniffed. Far off, his sensitive nostrils told him, was
human habitation. Presumably that meant food was there, too. Humans and
food, in Bobby’s experience, always went together. The pup followed the
command of his scent and trotted dubiously toward the distant man-reek.
In another quarter-hour the starving pup was sniffing about the locked
kitchen door of a farmhouse. Within, he could smell milk and meat and
bread. But that was all the good it did him. Timidly he skirted the
house for ingress. Almost had he completed the round when a stronger
odour smote his senses. It was a smell which, of old he would have
disregarded. But, with the primal impulse of famine, other atavistic
traits were stirring in the back of his necessity-sharpened brain.
His new scent was not of prepared food, but of hot and living prey.
Bobby paused by the unlatched door of the farm chicken coop. Tentatively
he scratched at the white-washed panel. Under the pressure the door
swung inward. Out gushed a pleasant warmth and a monstrously augmented
repetition of the whiff which had drawn him to the henhouse.
Just above him, well within reach, perched fifteen or twenty feathery
balls of varicoloured fluff. And famine did the rest.
Acting on some impulse wholly beyond his ken, Bobby sprang aloft and
drove his white milk teeth deep into the breast of a Plymouth Rock hen.
Instantly, his ears were assailed by a most ungodly racket. The quiet
hencoop was hideous with eldritch squawks and was alive with feathers.
All Bobby’s natural fear urged him to drop this flapping and squawking
hen and to run for his life.
But something infinitely more potent than fear had taken hold upon him.
Through his fright surged a sensation of mad rapture. He had set teeth
in live prey. Blood was hot in his nostrils. Quivering flesh was
twisting and struggling between his tense jaws. For the moment he was a
primitive forest beast.
Still gripping his noisy five-pound burden, he galloped out of the
hencoop and across the barnyard; heading instinctively for the lair in
which he had found a soft bed and safety from human intruders. As he
fled, he heard a man’s bellowing voice. A light showed in an upper
window of the house. Bobby ran the faster.
The hen was heavy, for so spindling a killer. But Bobby’s overshot jaws
held firm. He dared not pause to eat his kill, until he should be safe
away from the shouting man.
Stumbling into his platform den, half dead with hunger and fatigue, the
dog sought his bed of leaves. And there he feasted, rather than ate. For
never before had he known such a meal. And when the last edible morsel
of it was gorged, he snuggled happily down in his nest and slept.
Poultry bones are the worst and most dangerous fare for any domesticated
dog. Their slivers tear murderously at throat and stomach and
intestines; and have claimed their slain victims by the hundred. Yet,
since the beginning of time, wild animals, as foxes and wolves, have fed
with impunity on such bones. No naturalist knows just why. And for some
reason Bobby was no more the worse for his orgy of crunched
chicken-bones than a coyote would have been.
He awoke, late in the morning. Some newborn sense, in addition to his
normal fear, warned him to stay in his den throughout the daylight
hours. And he did so; sleeping part of the time and part of the time
nosing about amid the flurry of feathers in vain search for some
overlooked bone or fragment of meat.
Dusk and hunger drove him forth again. And, as before, he sought the
farmstead which had furnished him with so delicious a meal. But as he
drew near, the sound of voices from indoors and the passing of an
occasional silhouette across the bright window shades of the kitchen
warned him of danger.
When, as the kitchen light was blown out, he ventured to the chicken
coop he found the door too fast-barred to yield to his hardest scratch.
Miserably hungry and disappointed he slunk away.
Three farms did Bobby visit that night before he found another with an
unlatched henhouse door. There the tragedy of the preceding evening was
repeated. Lugging an eight-pound Dominic rooster, Bobby made
scramblingly for his mile-distant lair. Behind him again raged sound and
fury. The eight-pound bird with its dangling legs and tail feathers kept
tripping up the fleeing dog; until, acting again on instinct, Bobby
slung the swaying body over his shoulder, fox-fashion, and thus made his
way with less discomfort.
By the third night the collie had taken another long step in his journey
backward to the wild. When a dog kills a chicken every one within a half
mile is likely to be drawn by the sound. When a fox or wolf or coyote
kills a chicken, the deed is done in dexterous silence; with no squawks
or flurry of feathers to tell the story. Nature teaches the killer this
secret. And Nature taught it to Bobby; as she has taught it to other
gone-wild dogs.
As a result, his depredations, thereafter, left no uproar behind them.
Also, he learned presently the vulpine art of hoarding;—in other words,
when safety permitted, to stay on the ground until he had not only slain
but eaten one chicken, and then to carry another bird back to his lair
for future use. It cut down the peril of over-many trips to neighbouring
coops.
In time, he learned to rely less and less on the close-guarded chickens
in the vicinity of his den, and to quarter the farm country for a radius
of ten or more miles in search of food. The same queer new instinct
taught him infinite craft in keeping away from humans and in covering
his tracks.
He was doing no more than are thousands of foxes throughout the world.
There was no miracle in his new-found deftness as a forager. Nature was
merely telling her ancient and simple secrets to a wise little brain no
longer too clogged by association with mankind to learn them.
There was a profitable side line to Bobby’s chicken hunts. The wilder
woods, back of Midwestburg, abounded in rabbits for such as had the wit
to find them. And Bobby acquired the wit.
Incredibly soon, he learned the wolf’s art of tracking a cottontail and
of stalking the prey until such moment as a lightning dash and a
blood-streaked swirl in the snow marked the end of the chase. Squirrels,
too, and an occasional unwary partridge or smaller bird, were added to
the collie’s menu. And more than once, as he grew stronger, Bobby lugged
homeward over his shoulder a twenty-pound lamb from some distant
sheepfold.
Nature had played a vilely cruel trick on Lochinvar Bobby by bringing
him into the world as the puny and defective runt of a royal litter. She
had threatened his life by casting him loose in the winter woods. But at
that point Nature seemed to repent of her unkindness to the poor
helpless atom of colliehood. For she taught him the closest-guarded
secrets of her awful Live-On-One-Another ritual.
As winter grew soggy at the far approach of spring, Bobby found less and
less trouble in making a nightly run of thirty miles in search of meals
or in carrying back to his lair the heaviest of burdens.
Feasting on raw meat—and plenty of it—living in the open, with the icy
cold for his bedfellow, he was taking one of the only two courses left
to those who must forage or die. Readily enough he might have dwindled
and starved. The chill weather might have snuffed out his gangling life.
Instead, the cold and the exposure, and the needful exercise, and the
life according to forest nature, and the rich supply of meat that was
his for the catching—all these had worked wonders on the spindling runt.
His narrow chest had filled out, from much lung work. His shoulders,
from the same cause and from incessant night running, had taken on a
splendid breadth. His gawkily shambling body grew rapidly. The overshot
puppy jaw was levelling. And as his frame grew it shaped itself along
lines of powerful grace, such as Nature gives to the leopard and to the
stag. Incessant exposure to the cold had changed his sparse covering of
hair to a coat whose thickness and length and texture would have been
the wonder of the dog-show world. In brief, his mode of life was
achieving for him what all the kennel experts and vets unhung could not
have accomplished.
It had been a case of kill or cure. Bobby was cured.
After the departure of the snows and the zero nights, and before the
leafage made secret progress safe through forest and meadow, Bobby knew
a period of leanness. True, he foraged as before, but he did it at far
greater risk and with less certainty of results.
For—he could not guess why—the countryside was infested nowadays with
armed men; men who carried rifle or shot-gun and who not only scoured
hill and valley by daylight but lurked outside chicken coops and
sheepfolds by night.
Of course, by day Bobby could avoid them—and he did—by lying close in
his den. And at night his amazingly keen sense of smell enabled him to
skirt them, out of gun-shot range, as they waited at barn door or at
fold gate. But such necessity for caution played havoc with his chances
for easily acquired food. And for the most part he had to fall back on
rabbit-catching or to travelling far afield. This, until the thickening
of foliage made his hunting excursions safer from detection by human
eye.
There was sufficient reason for all this patrolling of the district.
During the past few months word had seeped through the farm country that
a wolf was at large in the long wolfless region; and that he was
slaughtering all manner of livestock, from pullets to newborn calves.
No dog, it was argued, could be the killer. For no known dog could slay
so silently and cover his tracks with such consummate skill. Nor could a
fox carry away a lamb of double its own weight. The marauder must be a
wolf. And old-timers raked up yarns of the superhumanly clever exploits
of lone wolves, in the days when populous Midwestburg was a trading
post.
The county Grange took up the matter and offered a bounty of fifty
dollars for the wolf’s scalp and ears. It was a slack time on the
farms—the period between woodcutting and early planting. It was a slack
time in Midwestburg, too; several mills having shut down for a couple of
months.
Thus, farmers and operatives amused themselves by making a try for the
fifty dollars and for the honour of potting the super-wolf. It was
pleasant if profitless sport for the hunters. But it cut down Bobby’s
rations; until farm work and reopening mills called off the quest. Then
life went on as before; after a buckshot graze on the hip had taught the
collie to beware of spring guns and to know their scent.
So the fat summer drowsed along. And so autumn brought again to the
northern air the tang which started afresh the splendid luxuriance of
the tawny coat which Bobby had shed during the first weeks of spring.
Late in December the dog had a narrow escape from death. A farmer,
furious at the demise of his best Jersey calf, went gunning afresh for
the mysterious wolf. With him he took along a German police dog—this
being before the days when that breed was de-Germanised into the new
title of “shepherd dog.” He had borrowed the police dog for the hunt,
lured by its master’s tales of his pet’s invincible ferocity.
Man and dog had searched the woods in vain all day, some five miles to
north of Bobby’s cave. At early dusk they were heading homeward through
a rock gulch.
The wind was setting strong from the north. Midway through the gulch the
police dog halted, back abristle, growling far down in his throat. The
man looked up.
As he did so, Bobby topped the cliff which formed the gulch’s northerly
side. The collie was on his way to a farm in the valley beyond, which he
had not visited for so long a time that its occupants might reasonably
be supposed to have relaxed some of their unneighbourly vigilance. The
wind from the north kept him from smelling or hearing the two in the
gully a hundred feet to south of him.
Yet, reaching the summit, Bobby paused; his wonted caution bidding him
search the lower grounds for sign of danger, before travelling farther
by fading daylight in such an exposed position.
It was then that the farmer saw him clearly, for the best part of two
seconds, silhouetted against the dying sunset. The man knew little
enough of collies, and less of wolves. And his mental vision was set for
a wolf. Thus, to the best of his belief, a wolf was what he saw. But he
saw also something he had not expected to see.
The last rays of the sun glinted on a bit of metal that swung beneath
Bobby’s shaggy throat; metal that had been worn bright by constant
friction with the dog’s ruff.
Thanks to the twist of wire which had been fastened into his hair, Bobby
had not slipped the leathern collar wherewith Frayne had equipped him.
And later his swelling muscular neck had been large enough to hold it
on. From its ring the old license tag still dangled.
Up went the farmer’s gun. He fired both barrels. As he pressed the two
triggers at once, the police dog made a rush for the collie. The farmer
chanced to be just in front of his canine companion. The police dog
sought a short cut, to reach his foe, by diving between the marksman’s
slightly spread legs. The two gun barrels were fired straight upward
into the sky; and the tripped-up hunter sat down with extreme suddenness
on a pointed jut of rock.
By the time he could focus his maddened gaze on the cliff-top again,
Bobby had vanished. The police dog was charging over the summit at
express-train speed. The farmer shook an impotent fist after the
disappearing spoiler of his aim.
“I hope he licks the life out of you if you ever catch up with him, you
bunglin’ fool!” he bellowed.
His wish came true. Next day, in a hollow, a mile farther on, the body
of the police dog was found, a score of slashes on his greyish hide and
one through his jugular. No police dog ever lived that could catch up
with a galloping collie who did not want to be caught. Bobby had varied
a career of profit with a moment or two of real pleasure.
Two days later, in the Midwestburg _Herald_, Jamie Mackellar read the
account of this fragmentary drama. He scanned it with no deep interest.
Tales of the wolf had grown stale to _Herald_ readers. But suddenly his
attention focused itself on the line:
“Mr. Gierson declares that a small disk of metal was suspended from the
throat of the brute.”
Jamie laid down the paper and went into executive session with his own
inner consciousness. A disk of metal, suspended from the throat of an
animal, means but one thing. It is a license tag. Never has such a tag
been fastened to a wolf.
Back into Mackellar’s memory came the picture of a poor shivering waif
from whose meagre and almost naked throat hung a huge collar; a collar
affixed by wire which was wound into such sparse strands of hair as
could be made to support it.
On the morning after the next snowfall, Jamie took a day off. Carrying
only a collar and chain and a muzzle, he fared forth into the woods. All
day he hunted. He found nothing.
A week later came another snowfall in the night. Next morning Mackellar
set forth again; this time letting his little son Donald come along. He
had told his family the far-fetched suspicion that had dawned upon him,
and Donald had clamoured to join the hunt.
On his first search, Jamie had quartered the country to west of the
ridge. To-day he climbed the rocks and made his way into the rolling
land below. Skirting Blake’s Woods, he was moving on toward the farms
when, in the fresh snow, he came upon the tracks he sought. For an hour
he followed them. Apparently they led nowhere. At least, they doubled
twice upon themselves and then vanished on a long outcrop of snowless
rock which stretched back into Blake’s Woods.
Tiring of this fruitless way of spending the morning, Donald strayed
from his father. Into the woods he wandered. And presently he sighted
the dancing platform amid its tangle of dead weeds. Running over to it,
the boy climbed thereon. Then, striking an attitude, he began to
harangue an invisible audience, from the platform edge; after the manner
of a cart-tail political orator he had observed with emulous delight.
“My friends!” he shrilled, from memory, “Our anc’st’rs fit fer the
lib’ty we enjoy! Are we goin’ to—? _Ouch!_ Hey, Daddy!”
One rhetorically stamping little foot had smashed through the rotten
boarding. Nor could Donald draw it out. At the yell of fright, Jamie
came running. But, a few yards from his son, Mackellar slid to a stop.
His eyes were fixed on an opening just below the boy’s imprisoned foot;
an opening from which the passage of Donald’s advancing body had cleared
aside some of the tangled weeds. From the tip of a ragged lath, at the
edge of this aperture, fluttered a tuft of tawny hair.
Pulling Donald free, Mackellar got down on all fours and peeped into the
space beneath the platform. For a few seconds he could see nothing.
Then, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the dimness, he descried two
greenish points of light turned toward him from the farthest corner of
the lair.
“Bobby?” called the man doubtfully.
The cornered dog heard the name. It roused vague half memories. The
memories were not pleasant; though the voice had in it a friendliness
that stirred the collie strangely.
Bobby crouched the closer to earth and his lips writhed back from
murderous white teeth. The man called again; in the same friendly,
coaxing voice. Then he began to crawl forward a foot or so. Behind him
the excited boy was blocking the only way out of the den.
The Lochinvar Bobby of ten months ago would have cowered whimperingly in
his corner, waiting for capture. He might even have pleaded for mercy by
rolling over on his back.
The Lochinvar Bobby of to-day was quite another creature. He laid out
his plan of campaign, and then in the wink of an eye he carried it into
effect.
With a rabid snarl he charged the advancing man. As Jamie braced himself
to fend off the ravening jaws, the dog veered sharply to one side and
dashed for the opening. Instinct told him the boy would be easier to
break past than the man.
But it was not Jamie Mackellar’s first experience with fighting or
playing dogs. As Bobby veered, Jamie slewed his own prostrate body to
the same side and made a grab for the fast-flying collie. His fingers
closed and tightened around Bobby’s left hind leg, just below the hock.
With a snarl, Bobby wheeled and drove his jaws at the captor’s wrist; in
a slash which might well have severed an artery. But, expecting just
such a move, Jamie was ready with his free hand. Its fingers buried
themselves in the avalanche of fur to one side of Bobby’s throat. The
slashing eye-teeth barely grazed the pinioning wrist. And Bobby thrashed
furiously from side to side, to free himself and to rend his enemy.
Mackellar’ s expert hands found grips to either side of the whirling
jaws, and he held on. Bit by bit, bracing himself with all his wiry
strength, he backed out; dragging the frantic beast behind him.
Five minutes later, at the expense of a few half-averted bites, he had
the muzzle tight-bound in place and was leading the exhausted and
foaming collie toward Midwestburg. Bobby held back, he flung himself
against the chain, he fought with futile madness against the gentle
skill of his master.
Then shuddering all over he gave up the fight. Head and tail a-droop, he
suffered himself to be led to prison.
“It’s Lochinvar Bobby, all right!” the wondering Jamie was saying to his
son in intervals of lavishing kindly talk and pats on the luckless dog.
"The collar and tag prove that. But if it wasn’t for them, I’d swear it
couldn’t be the same. It’s—it’s enough to take a body’s breath away,
Donald! I’ve followed the dog game from the time I was born, but I never
set eyes on such a collie in all my days. Just run your hand through
that coat! Was there ever another like it? And did you ever see such
bone and head? He’s—Lord, to think how he looked when that Frayne crook
sawed him off on me! It’s a miracle he lived through the first winter. I
never heard of but one other case like it. And that happened up in
Toronto, if I remember right.
“Now, listen, sonny: I’m not honing to be sued for damages by every
farmer in the county. So let’ em keep on looking for their wolf. This is
a dog I bought last year. He’s been away in the country till now. That’s
the truth. And the rest is nobody’s business. But—but if it keeps me
speiring for a week, to figger it out, I’m going to hit on some way to
let Mr. Lucius Frayne, Esquire, see he hasn’t stung me so hard as he
thought he did!”
For two days Bobby refused to eat or drink. In the stout inclosure built
for him in Mackellar’s back yard he stood, head and tail a-droop, every
now and then shivering as if with ague. Then, little by little, Jamie’s
skilled attentions did their work. The wondrous lure of human
fellowship, the joy of cooked food, and the sense of security against
harm, and, above all, a collie’s ancestral love for the one man he
chooses for his god—these wrought their work.
In less than a fortnight Bobby was once more a collie. The spirit of the
wild beast had departed from him; and he took his rightful place as the
chum of the soft-voiced little Scot he was learning to worship. Yes, and
he was happy,—happier than ever before;—happy with a new and strangely
sweet contentment. He had come into a collie’s eternal heritage.