Always he must be fed by hand. Even then he would not touch any food but
cooked meat.
Normally, the solution to this would have been to let him go hungry
until he was ready to eat. But a valuable show-and-stud collie cannot be
allowed to become a skeleton and lifeless for lack of food, any more
than a winning race-horse can be permitted to starve away his strength
and speed.
Treve’s daily pound-and-a-half of broiled chuck steak was cut in small
pieces and set before him on a plate. Then began the eternal task of
making him eat it. Did we turn our backs on him for a single minute—the
food had vanished when next we looked.
But it had not vanished down Treve’s dainty throat. Casual search
revealed every missing morsel of meat shoved neatly out of sight under
the edges of the plate or else hidden in the grass or under nearby
boards or handfuls of straw.
This daily meal was a game. Treve enjoyed it immensely. Not being
blessed with patience, I abhorred it. So Robert Friend took the duty of
feeding him. At sound of Robert’s distant knife, whetted to cut up the
meat, Treve would come flying to the hammock where I sat writing. At a
bound he was in my lap, all fours and all fur—the entire sixty pounds of
him—and with his head thrust under one of the hammock cushions.
Thence, at Robert’s call, and at my own exhortation, he would come forth
with mincing reluctance and approach the tempting dish of broiled steak.
Looking coldly upon the food, he would lie down. To all of Robert’s
allurements to eat, the dog turned a deaf ear. Once in a blue moon, he
consented to swallow the steak, piece by piece, if Robert would feed it
to him by hand. Oftener it was necessary to call on Wolf to act as
stimulant to appetite.
"Then I’ll give it to Wolf,“ Robert would threaten. ”_Wolf!_"
Treve got to his feet with head lowered and teeth bared. Robert called
Wolf, who came lazily to play his part in the daily game for a guerdon
of one piece of the meat.
Six feet away from the dish, Wolf paused. But his work was done.
Growling, barking, roaring, Treve attacked the dish; snatching up and
bolting one morsel of meat at a time. Between every two bites he
bellowed threats and insults at the placidly watching Wolf,—Wolf who
could thrash his weight in tigers and who, after Lad and Bruce died, was
the acknowledged king of all the Place’s dogs.
In this way, mouthful by mouthful and with an accompaniment of raging
noise that could be heard across the lake, Treve disposed of his dinner.
Yes, it was a silly thing to humour him in the game. But there was no
other method of making him eat the food on which depended his continued
show-form and his dynamite vitality. When it came to giving him his two
raw eggs a day, there was nothing to that but forcible feeding. In solid
cash prizes and in fees, Treve paid back, by many hundred per cent., the
high cost of his food.
When he was little more than a puppy, he fell dangerously ill with some
kind of heart trouble. Dr. Hopper said he must have medicine every half
hour, day and night, until he should be better. I sat up with him for
two nights.
I got little enough work done, between times, on those two nights. The
suffering dog, lay on a rug beside my study desk. But he was uneasy and
wanted to be talked to. He was in too much pain to go to sleep. In a
corner of my study was a tin biscuit box, which I kept filled with
animal crackers, as occasional titbits for the collies. Every now and
then, during our two-night vigil, I took an animal cracker from the box
and fed it to Treve.
By the second night he was having a beautiful time. I was not.
The study seemed to him a most delightful place. Forthwith he adopted it
as his lair. By the third morning he was out of danger and indeed was
practically well again. But he had acquired the study-habit; a habit
which lasted throughout his short life.
From that time on, it was Treve’s study; not mine. The tin cracker box
became his treasure chest; a thing to be guarded as jealously as ever
was the Nibelungen Hoard or the Koh-i-noor.
If he chanced to be lying in any other room, and a dog unconsciously
walked between him and the study, Treve bounded up from the soundest
sleep and rushed growlingly to the study door, whence he snarled
defiance at the possible intruder. If he were in the study and another
dog ventured near, Treve’s teeth were bared and Treve’s fore-feet were
planted firmly atop the tin box; as he ordered away the potential
despoiler of his hoard.
No human, save only the Mistress and myself, might enter the study
unchallenged. Grudgingly, Treve conceded her right and mine to be there.
But a rush at the ankles of any one else discouraged ingress. I remember
my daughter stopped in there one day to speak to me; on her way for a
swim. As the bathing-dressed figure appeared on the threshold, Treve
made a snarling rush for it. Alternately and vehemently he bit both bare
ankles.
“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” complained my daughter, annoyed. “He
_tickles_ so when he bites!”
No expert trainer has worked more skilfully and tirelessly over a Derby
winner than did Robert Friend over that dog’s shimmering red-gold coat.
For an hour or more every day, he groomed Treve, until the burnished fur
stood out like a Circassian beauty’s coiffure and glowed like molten
gold. The dog stood moveless throughout the long and tedious process;
except when he obeyed the order to turn to one side or the other or to
lift his head or to put up his paws for a brushing of the silken
sleeve-ruffles.
It was Robert, too, who hit on the scheme which gave Treve his last
show-victory; when the collie already had won fourteen of the needful
fifteen points which should make him a Champion of Record.
Perhaps you think it is easy to pilot even the best of dogs through the
gruelling ordeals that go to make up those fifteen points. Well, it is
not.
Many breeders take their dogs on the various show-circuits, keeping them
on the bench for three days at a time; and then, week after week,
shipping them in stuffy crates from town to town, from show to show. In
this way, the championship points sometimes pile up with reasonable
speed;—and sometimes never at all. (Sometimes, too, the luckless dog is
found dead in his crate, on arriving at the show-hall. Oftener he
catches distemper and dies in more painful and leisurely fashion.)
I am too foolishly mush-hearted to inflict such torture on any of our
Sunnybank collies. I never take my dogs to a show that cannot be reached
by comfortable motor ride within two or three hours at most; nor to any
show whence they cannot return home at the end of a single day. Thus,
championship points mount up more slowly at Sunnybank than at some other
kennels. But thus, too, our dogs, for the most part, stay alive and in
splendid health. I sleep the sounder at night, for knowing my collie
chums are not in misery in some distemper-tainted dogshow-building.
In like manner, it is a fixed rule with us never to ship a Sunnybank
puppy anywhere by express to a purchaser People must come here in person
and take home the pups they buy from me. Buyers have motored to
Sunnybank for pups from Maine and Ohio and even from California.
These scruples of mine have earned me the good-natured guying of more
sensible collie breeders.
Well, Treve had picked up fourteen of the fifteen points needed to
complete his championship. The last worthwhile show of the spring
season—within motor distance—was at Noble, Pa., on June 10, 1922.
Incidentally, June 10, 1922, was Treve’s third birthday. His wonderful
coat was at the climax of its shining fulness. By autumn he would be
“out of coat”; and an out-of-coat collie stands small chance of winning.
So Robert and I drove over to Noble with him.
The day was stewingly hot; the drive was long. Show-goers crowded around
the splendid dog before the judging began. Bit by bit, Treve’s nerves
began to fray. We kept him off his bench and in the shade, and we did
what we could to steer admirers away from him. But it was no use. By the
time the collie division was called into the tented ring, Treve was
profoundly unhappy and cranky.
He slouched in, with no more “form” to him than a plough horse. With the
rest of his class (“Open, sable-and-white”), he went through the parade.
Judge Cooper called the contestants one by one up to the block; Treve
last of all. My best efforts could not rouse the dog from his sullen
apathy.
It was then that Robert Friend played his trump card. Standing just
outside the ring, among the jam of spectators, he called excitedly:
“_Wolf!_ I’ll give it to Wolf!”
I don’t know what the other spectators thought of this outburst. But I
know the effect it had on Treve.
In a flash the great dog was alert and tense; his tulip ears up, his
whole body at attention, the look of eagles in his eyes as he scanned
the ringside for a glimpse of his friend, Wolf.
Judge Cooper took one long look at him. Then, without so much as laying
a hand on the magnificently-showing Treve, he awarded him the blue
ribbon in his class.
I had sense enough to take the dog into one corner and to keep him
there, quieting and steadying him until the Winners’ Class was called.
As I led him into the ring, then, to compete with the other classes’
blue ribboners, Robert called once more to the absent Wolf. Again the
trick served. The collie moved and stood as if galvanised into sparkling
life.
Cooper handed me the Winners’ rosette; the rosette whose acquisition
made Treve a Champion of Record!
It was only about a year ago. In that little handful of time, the judge
who made him a champion—the new-made champion himself—the dog whose name
roused him from his apathy in the ring—all three are dead. I don’t think
a white sportsman like Cooper would mind my linking his name with two
such supreme collies, in this word of necrology. Cooper—Treve—_Wolf!_
(There’s lots of room in this old earth of ours for the digging of
graves, isn’t there?)
Home we came with our champion—Champion Sunnybank Sigurd—who displayed
so little championship dignity that, an hour after our return to the
Place, he lifted my brand new Panama hat daintily from the hall-table,
carried it forth from the house with a loving tenderness; laid it to
rest in a patch of lakeside mud; and then rolled on it.
I was too elated over our triumph to scold him for the costly sacrilege.
I am glad now that I didn’t. For a scolding or a single harsh word ever
reduced him to utter heartbreak.
And so for a while, at the Place, our golden champion continued to revel
in the gay zest of life.
He was the livest dog I have known. Wolf alone was his chum among all
the Sunnybank collies. Wolf alone, with his mighty heart and vast wisdom
and his elfin sense of fun and his love for frolic. Wolf and Treve used
to play a complicated game whose chief move consisted of a sweeping
breakneck gallop, for perhaps a half-mile, to the accompaniment of a
fanfare of barking. Across the green lawns they would flash, like
red-gold meteors; and at a pace none of their fleet-footed brethren
could maintain.
One morning they started as usual on this whirlwind dash. But at the end
of the first few yards, Treve swayed in his flying stride, faltered to a
stop and came slowly back to me. He thrust his muzzle into my cupped
hand—for the first time in his undemonstrative life—then stood wearily
beside me.
A strange transformation had come over him. The best way I can describe
it is to say that the glowing inward fire which always had seemed to
shine through him—even to the flaming bright mass of coat—was gone. He
was all at once old and sedate and massive; a dog of elderly dignity—a
dignity oddly majestic. The mischief imp had fled from his eyes; the
sheen and sunlight had vanished from his coat. He had ceased to be
Treve.
I sent in a rush for the nearest good vet. The doctor examined the
invalid with all the skilled attention due a dog whose cash value runs
into four figures. Then he gave verdict.
It was the heart;—the heart that had been flighty in puppyhood days, but
which two competent vets had since pronounced as sound as the
traditional bell.
For a day longer the collie lived;—at least a gravely gentle and
majestic collie lived in the marvellous body that had been Treve’s. He
did not suffer—or so the doctor told us—and he was content to stay very
close to me; his paw or his head on my foot.
At last, stretching himself drowsily to sleep, he died.
It seemed impossible that such a swirl of glad life and mischief and
beauty could have been wiped out in twenty-four little hours.
Not for our virtues nor for our general worthiness are we remembered
wistfully by those who stay on. Not for our sterling qualities are we
cruelly missed when missing is futile. Worthiness, in its death, does
not leave behind it the grinding heartache that comes at memory of some
lovably naughty or mischievous or delightfully perverse trait.
Treve’s entertaining badnesses had woven themselves into the very life
of the Place. Their passing left a keen hurt. The more so because, under
them, lay bedrock of staunch loyalty and gentleness.
I have not the skill to paint our eccentrically lovable chum’s word
picture, except in this clumsily written sketch. If I were to attempt to
make a whole book of him, the result would be a daub.
But I have tried at least to make his _name_ remembered by a few
readers; by giving it to the hero of the “Treve” collection of stories.
Perhaps some one, reading, may like the name, even if not the stories,
and may call his or her next collie, “Treve”; in memory of a gallant dog
that was dear to Sunnybank.
We buried him in the woods, near the house, here. A granite boulder
serves as his headstone.
Alongside that boulder, a few days ago, we buried the Mistress’s hero
collie, Wolf; close to his old-time playmate, Treve.
Perhaps you may care to hear a word or two of Wolf’s plucky death. Some
of you have read his adventures in my other dog stories. More of you
read of his passing. For nearly every newspaper in America printed a
long account of it.
It is an account worth reading and rereading; as is every tale of clean
courage. I am going to quote part of the finely-written story that
appeared in the _New York Times_ of June 28, 1923; a story far beyond
power of mine to improve on or to equal:
"Wolf, son of Lad, is dead. The shaggy collie, with the eyes that
understood and the friendly tail, made famous in the stories of Albert
Payson Terhune, died like a thoroughbred. So when Wolf joined his
father, in the canine Beyond, last Sunday night, there was no hanging
of heads.
"Wolf died a hero. But yesterday the level lawns of Sunnybank, the
Terhune place at Pompton Lakes, N. J., seemed empty and the big house
was curiously quiet. True, other collies were there; but so, too, was
the big boulder out in the woods with just ‘Wolf’ graven across it.
"Ten years ago, when thousands of readers were following Lad’s career
as told by his owner, Mr. Terhune, an interesting event took place at
Sunnybank. Of all the puppies that had or have come to Sunnybank, that
group of newcomers was the most mischievous. Admittedly, Lad was
properly proud, but readers will remember his occasional misgivings
about one of the pups. The cause of parental concern was Wolf. He was
a good puppy, you know, but a trifle boisterous; maybe—yes, he was,
the littlest bit inclined to wildness.
"In 1918 Lad passed on; and the whole country mourned his departure.
Wolf succeeded his famous father in the stories of Mr. Terhune. The
son had long since abandoned his harum-scarum ways and had developed
into a model member of the Terhune dog circle. Wolf was the property
and the pet of Mrs. Terhune.
"He became the cleverest of all the collies. One could talk to Wolf
and get understanding and no back talk. One could depend on Wolf and
get full loyalty. One could like Wolf and say so; and the soft cool
nose would come poking around and the tail would begin to wag till it
seemed as if Wolf would wag himself off his feet.
"Wolf constituted himself warden of the Sunnybank lawns and custodian
of the driveways. When motoring parties came in and endangered the
lives of the puppies playing about the driveways, Wolf, at the first
sound of the motor, would dash importantly down into the drive and
would herd or chase every puppy out of harm’s way.
"Each evening it was the habit of Wolf to saunter off on a long
‘walk.’ Three evenings ago he rambled away and—
"Down in the darkness at the railroad station some folk were waiting
to see the Stroudsburg express flash by. It was a few minutes late. A
nondescript dog, with a hunted, homeless droop to his tail, trotted
onto the tracks.
"Far down the line there came the warning screech of the express. The
canine tramp didn’t pay any attention to it, but sat down to scratch
at a flea.
"The headlight of the express shot a beam glistening along the rails.
Wolf saw the dog and the danger. With a bark and a snap, the son of
Lad thrust the stranger off the track and drove him to safety.
“The express was whistling, for a crossing, far past the station, when
they picked up what was Wolf and started for the Terhune home.”
All dogs die too soon. Many humans don’t die soon enough. A dog is only
a dog. And a dog is too gorgeously normal, and wholesome to be made
ridiculous in death by his owner’s sloppy sentimentality.
The stories of one’s dogs, like the recital of one’s dreams, are of no
special interest to others. Perhaps I have talked overlong about these
two collie chums of ours. Belatedly, I ask your forgiveness if I have
bored you.
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE.
_“Sunnybank,”
Pompton Lakes,
New Jersey_.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note
‘Field-mouse’ appears with and without the hyphen. Both are given here
as printed. ‘Hand gallop’ also appears as a single word, unhyphenated.
Both are retained.
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
The following issues should be noted, along with the resolutions.
21.1 first one should[d]er and then the other Removed.
22.25 without bird dog or rabb[b]it hound Removed.
32.17 a ten-foot clif[t/f] Replaced.
153.24 L[i/o]chinvar King that day clove his path Replaced.
170.8 He found nothing[.] Added.
181.18 with a truck of my own[.] Added.
182.5 spring o[r/f] ribs Replaced.
211.4 and deposit them there[.] Added.
214.11 No expert trainer [w/a]s worked more skilfully Replaced.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Heart of a Dog, by Albert Payson Terhune