A REGULAR DOG
WIGGLEDY loved nothing better than to go snow-shoeing with the Ranger’s
children.
Of course the fat pup was helpless in the deep snow, but he would go
plunging into their snow-shoe tracks, leaping from one to another with
the most joyous barking and wriggling and flapping of ears.
Sometimes he caught up with them. Then he would try to steal a ride on
the back of a snow-shoe, till they discovered why it was so hard to
lift that foot.
After awhile they taught him to help them bring in the firewood. Giving
him just one small stick at a time to take between his jaws, they had
him trotting ahead of them, every trip they made.
Later they made him a harness and taught him to drag their light sled
over the snow crust, though he would have to grow a lot before he could
bring in wood that way. To both the children and the pup it was all
just fun. They wouldn’t have enjoyed it a bit if they had had to do it.
“I do believe that pup’s going to pan out a regular dog,” the Ranger
decided. “I tell you what, it takes these mongrels for just plain,
ordinary brains,--not the kind that bird dogs have, nor fighting dogs,
nor any special kind, but just plain all-’round brains.”
“And heart,” added his wife softly, watching the children romping with
Wiggledy on the hearth rug. “I’ll feel now, if anything happened to the
children when they’re out snow-shoeing, he’ll come and tell me, or die
fighting for them.”
“I hadn’t noticed that he was particularly scrappy.”
“Ho, ho! You haven’t seen him chasing Clickety-Clack. I wonder how
he’ll hit it off with the little bear.”
“That we shall see when spring comes.”
Now Ring-tail had formed the habit of sleeping on the children’s bed.
When Wiggledy first came, he was so tiny and so lonesome that he, too,
was taken under cover. About this time the excitement began.
When the two animals were kept on opposite sides of the bed, there was
peace. But let Wiggledy come too near and Ring-tail promptly boxed
his ears. Then he would yelp and scuttle closer to the children. And
sometimes they were awakened by a regular cat and dog fight,--in which
the pup, being the youngest, generally got the worst of it.
If the pup were banished, he howled forlornly till they took him
back to the warmth of their beds and hearts. Finally it came to be
understood between them that Wiggledy was to sleep down at the foot,
under a fold of blanket, while Ring-tail took the head, where the
feather-bed billowed out above the children’s heads, and where she
could come and go without disturbing any one,--for she was still a
prowler of the night.
If the children overslept and Wiggledy got hungry, he would simply
pull the covers off them.
The question was what would happen when Fuzzy-Wuzz came back.