This is not properly the story of Job’s youth or of his life, but of his
aging and the death of him. Nevertheless there was much in his life that
was worth the telling. His reputation rests not on Chet’s word
alone--the village knew him and was proud of him. His renown began in
his third year in deep winter when Chet and Jim Saladine went fishing
one day through the ice on Sebacook Pond. Chet and Saladine became
separated, one on either side of the lower end of the pond, and Jim had
the pail of bait. Chet made Job go after the pail clear across the pond
and fetch it to him and take it back to Saladine again. The dog’s
sagacity and understanding, evidenced then and chronicled by Saladine at
Bissell’s store that night, were to wax thereafter for half a dozen
years; and even when the dog grew old his understanding never waned.
It was in his ninth year that Job had his greatest day--a day into which
he crowded epic deeds enough to make heroes of half a dozen dogs. And
the tale of that day may perhaps be worth the telling.
Chet had taken Job out the night before to try for a partridge in the
fringes of the wood below the farm. They were late in starting, but
within fifteen minutes Job was marking game and just at sunset the bird
rose and wheeled toward the thickets of the wood. Chet had a snap shot;
he took it and he saw the bird’s legs drop and dangle before it
disappeared. He knew what that meant. A body wound, a deadly wound. The
bird would fly so long as its wings would function, then set its pinions
and glide in a long slant to earth, and when it struck ground it would
be dead.
He sent Job into the wood, himself followed the dog, and he was in
haste, for dark was already coming down. He hunted till he could no
longer see--found nothing. In the end he called Job in, and the dog
reluctantly abandoned the search at Chet’s command and followed his
master back to the farm.
Two Rockland men telephoned that evening asking if they might come to
the farm next day and try for birds; and Chet, who can always find time
for a day’s gunning, bade them come. Doctor Gunther, who was
telephoning, said: “Hayes and I’ll be there by half past eight. Mind if
we bring our dogs?”
“Mind? No,” said Chet. “Sure!”
“They’re wild,” said the doctor, “but I’d like to have them work with
Job--do them good.”
“Best thing in the world for them,” Chet agreed. “Let them back him on a
few points and it’ll steady them. I’ll look for you.”
In the morning he rose early and busied himself with his chores so that
he might be ready when the hunters came. It was not an ideal hunting
day. The morning was lowery and overcast and warm and there was a wind
from the east that promised fog or rain. With an eye on the clouds Chet
worked swiftly. He fed Job in the shed where the dog usually slept and
it chanced that he left the door latched so that Job was a prisoner
until the others arrived. They were a little ahead of time and Chet
asked them to wait a little. He had been picking apples in the orchard
behind the shed and he took them out there to see the full barrels of
firm fruit. Job went out into the orchard with them and no one of the
men noticed that the dog slipped away beyond the barn toward the woods.
When a little later they were ready to start Chet missed the dog. He is
a profane man, and he swore and whistled and called. Hayes, the man who
had come with Gunther, winked at the doctor and asked Chet: “Is he a
self-hunter? Has he gone off on his own?”
“Never did before,” Chet said hotly. His heat was for Job, not for
Hayes. “I’ll teach him something!”
He went out behind the barn, still whistling and calling, and the others
followed him. Their dogs were in the car in which they had come from
Rockland. The three men walked across the garden to the brow of the hill
above the river and Chet blew his whistle till he was purple of
countenance. The other two were secretly amused, as men are apt to be
amused when they find that an idol has feet of clay. For Job was a
famous dog.
Hayes it was who caught first sight of him and said, “There he comes
now.”
They all looked and saw Job loping heavily up the slope through an open
fringe of birches. But it was not till he scrambled over the wall that
they saw he bore something in his mouth.
Hayes said, “He’s got a woodchuck.”
Chet, with keener eyes, stared for a moment, then exclaimed exultantly:
“He’s got that partridge I killed down there last night! I knew that
bird was dead.”
They were still incredulous, even after he told them how he had shot the
bird the night before.
They were incredulous until Job came near enough for them all to see,
came trotting to Chet and proudly dropped the splendid bird at his
master’s feet. When they could no longer doubt they exclaimed. For such
a feat is alone enough to found a dog reputation on.
As for Chet, though he was swelled with pride, he made light of the
matter.
“You’ll see him work to-day though,” he said. “The scent lies on a day
like this. But it’ll rain by noon--we want to get started.”
They did get started and without more delay. They went in the car, and
after a mile or so stopped on a rocky ledge beside the road at what
Chet was used to call the Dummy Cover--an expanse of half a dozen acres
tangled with alders and birches and thorn and dotted with wild apple
trees here and there. Two or three low knolls lifted their heads above
the muck of the lower land--an ideal place for woodcock when the flight
was on.
The men got out and belled their dogs and old Job stood quietly at
Chet’s heel while Chet filled his pockets with shells. The other dogs
were racing and plunging, breaking across the wall, returning
impatiently at command, racing away again. When they were ready the
three men went through the bars, and with a gesture Chet sent Job into
an alder run to the right. The great dog began his systematic zigzagging
progress, designed to cover every foot of the ground, while the younger
dogs circled and scuffled and darted about him, nosing here and there,
wild with the excitement of the hunt.
Such dogs flush many birds and one of these dogs flushed a woodcock now
fifty yards ahead of where old Job was working. The bird started to
circle back, saw the men and veered away again. Though the range was
never less than forty yards, Chet, who had a heavy far-shooting gun,
took a snap shot through the alder tops as the bird turned in flight and
he saw it jump slightly in the air as though the sound of the gun had
startled it. Chet knew what that little break in its flight had meant
and he watched the bird as long as he could see it and marked where it
scaled to earth at last in the deeps of the cover ahead of them.
It was while his attention was thus distracted that Job disappeared.
When Chet had reloaded he looked round for the dog and Job was gone. He
listened and heard no sound of Job’s bell. He blew his whistle and blew
again. The other two dogs came galloping to their masters, heads up,
eyes questioning, but Job did not appear.
The man Hayes said: “He’s gone off alone. I wouldn’t have a dog I
couldn’t keep in.”
Chet looked at him with a flare of his native temper in his eyes.
“He’s got a bird,” said Chet. “He’s right here somewhere and he’s got a
bird.”
He turned and began to push his way into the alders and the other two
men kept pace with him, one on either side. It was hard going; they
could see only a little way. Now and then Chet whistled again, but for
the most part they went quietly. Woodcock may not be found in open
stubble like the obliging quail. You will come upon them singly or by
twos in wet alder runs or upon birch-clad knolls or even in the shelter
of a clump of evergreens--in thick cover almost always, where it is
difficult for a man to shoot; and the bird must usually be killed before
it has gone twenty yards in flight or it goes scot-free.
In such a cover as this the men were now hunting for Job; and at the end
of fifteen minutes, in which they had worked back and forth and to and
fro without discovering the dog, Hayes and the doctor were ready to give
up.
“Call him in,” Hayes told Chet. “Maybe we’ll see the bird get up. We
can’t find him and we’re wasting time.”
Chet hesitated, then he said: “I’ll shoot. Maybe that’ll scare up the
bird.”
On the last word his gun roared and through its very echoes each of the
three men heard the tinkle of a bell, and Chet, who was nearest, cried:
“There he is! Careful! The bird’s moving.”
The dog was in the very center of the cover they had traversed--in a
little depression where he chanced to be well hidden. They had passed
within twenty feet of him, yet had he held his point. Hayes was the
first to do homage.
“By gad,” he cried, “that is some dog, McAusland!”
“You be ready to shoot,” Chet retorted. “I’ll walk up the bird.”
They said they were ready; he moved in to one side of Job and the
woodcock got up on whistling wings. Hayes’ first shot knocked him down.
Job found another bird a little farther on and Chet killed it before it
topped the alders. Then they approached the spot where he had marked
down that first woodcock, the one which had been flushed by the
too-rangy dogs. He called Job, pointed, said briefly: “Find dead bird,
Job.”
The dog went in, began to work. When the other men came up Chet said: “I
think I hurt that first bird. He dropped in here. Job will find him.”
“Let’s send the other dogs in, too,” Hayes suggested. “Mine hasn’t
learned retrieving yet.”
Chet nodded and the other two dogs plunged into the cover to one side of
Job and began to circle, loping noisily. Job looked toward them with an
air of almost human disgust at such incompetency, then went on with his
business of finding the bird.
The men, watching, saw then a curious thing: they saw old Job freeze in
a point and as he did so the other dogs charged toward him. One,
Gunther’s, caught the scent ten feet away and froze. The other
hesitated, then came on--and Job growled, a warning deadly growl. The
other dog stopped still.
Chet exclaimed: “Now ain’t that comical? Hear old Job tell him to
freeze?”
Hayes nodded and the three stood for a moment, watching the motionless
dogs, silent. Then the young dog stirred again and Job moved forward two
paces and flattened his head so low it almost touched the ground
and--growled again.
Chet laughed.
“All right, Job,” he called. “Dead bird! Fetch it in!”
Job did not move, and Hayes said: “Maybe it’s not dead.
“I’ll walk in,” Chet told him. “I won’t shoot. You do the shooting.”
They nodded and he began to work in through the alders toward where Job
stood. The others waited in vantage points outside. Chet came abreast of
Job and stopped. But the dog stood still, and this surprised Chet, for
Job was accustomed to rush forward, flushing up the bird as soon as he
knew that Chet was near at hand. So the man studied the ground ahead of
Job’s nose, trying to locate the bird; and he moved forward a step or
two cautiously and at last began to beat to and fro, expecting every
minute to hear the whistle of the woodcock’s wings as it rose.
Nothing happened. The two younger dogs broke point with a careless air
as though to say they had not been pointing at all; that they had merely
been considering the matter. They began to move about in the alders. And
at last Chet, half convinced that Job was on a false point, turned to
his dog and said harshly: “There’s nothing here, Job. Come out of it.
Come along. Come in.”
Job watched Chet, but did not move. His lower jaw was fairly resting on
the ground, and Chet exclaimed impatiently and stooped and caught his
collar to drag him away. When he did this he saw the bird--saw its
spreading wing beneath Job’s very jaw--and he reached down and lifted
it, stone dead, from where it lay. Not till Chet had taken up the
woodcock did Job stir, but when he saw it safe in his master’s hand he
shook himself, looked at the other dogs with a triumphant cock of his
ears and turned and trotted on down the run.
They left that cover presently, put in an hour in the Fuller pasture,
where a partridge and two woodcock fell to their guns, and then drove
back to the farm. It was beginning to rain--the thick brush soaked them.
Chet bade them come and have dinner at the farm and wait on the chance
that the afternoon would see a clearing sky. So they had a dinner of
Chet’s cooking, and afterward they sat upon the side veranda watching
the rain, smoking.
Chet McAusland is an extravagantly generous man. If you go fishing with
him you take home both your fish and his own. He will not have it
otherwise. Likewise if you go into the covers the birds are yours.
“Sho, I can get woodcock any time! You take them,” he will say. “Go on
now.”
And it is so obvious that he is happier in giving than in keeping that
he usually has his way.
After dinner he brought out the birds that had been killed in the
morning and laid them on an empty chair beside him and began to tie
their legs together so that they could be conveniently handled. Job was
on the floor a yard away, apparently asleep. The men were talking. And
Job growled.
Chet looked down, saw there were kittens about--there were always
kittens at the farm--and reproved Job for growling at the kits. He was a
little surprised, for Job usually paid no attention to them, even
permitted them to eat from his plate. He said good-naturedly: “What are
you doing, Job? Scaring that little kitten? Ain’t you ashamed!”
Job was so far from being ashamed that he barked loudly and Chet bent to
cuff him into silence. Then he saw and laughed aloud. “Now ain’t that
comical!” he demanded. “Look a-there!”
One of the kittens under Chet’s very chair was laboring heavily, trying
to drag away a woodcock that seemed twice as large as itself. The other
men laughed; Chet rescued the woodcock; the kitten fled and Job beamed
with satisfaction and slapped his tail upon the floor.
Hayes cried: “By gad, McAusland, that dog has sense! I’d like to buy
him.”
“You don’t want to buy him. He’s getting old. He won’t be able to hunt
much longer.”
“Is he for sale?”
“Oh, you don’t want him,” Chet said uncomfortably. He hated to refuse
any man anything.
“I’ll give you three hundred for him,” said Hayes.
Now three hundred dollars was as much cash as Chet was like to see in a
year’s time, but--Job was Job. He hesitated, not because the offer
attracted him but because he did not wish to refuse Hayes. He hesitated,
but in the end he said, “You don’t want old Job.”
Gunther touched Hayes’ arm, caught his eye, shook his head; and Hayes
forbore to push the matter. But he could not refrain from praising Job.
“I never saw as good a dog!” he declared.
“He is a good dog,” Chet agreed. “He’ll break shot, but that’s his only
out. He’s staunch, he’ll mind, he works close in and he’s the best
retriever in the County.”
“You don’t lose many birds with him,” Hayes agreed.
“I can throw a pebble from here right over the barn and he’ll fetch it
in,” said Chet. “There’s nothing he won’t bring--if I tell him to.”
Gunther laughed.
“You’re taking in a good deal of territory, Chet.”
“I could tell you some things he’s done that would surprise you,” Chet
declared.
Hayes chuckled.
“Let’s try him out,” he suggested.
“All right.”
Hayes pointed toward the barn. The great doors were open and a yellow
and black cat was coming through the barn toward them. As Hayes pointed
her out she sat down in the doorway and began to lick her breast fur
down.
“Have him fetch the cat,” said Hayes.
Chet laughed. He stooped and touched the dog’s head.
“Job,” he said, “come here.”
Job got up and stood at Chet’s knee, looking up into his master’s face,
tail wagging slowly to and fro. Chet waved his hand toward the barn.
“Go fetch the cat,” he said. “Go fetch the cat, Job.” The dog looked
toward the barn, looked up at Chet again. Chet repeated, “Fetch the cat,
Job.”
And the dog, a little doubtfully, left them and walked toward the barn.
The cat saw Job coming, but was not afraid. They were old friends. All
creatures were friends on Chet’s farm. It rose as Job approached and
rubbed against his legs. Job stood still, uncertain; he looked back at
Chet, looked down at the cat, looked back at Chet.
“Fetch, Job!” Chet called.
Then the dog in a matter of fact way that delighted the three men on the
porch closed his jaws over the cat’s back, at the shoulder. The cat may
have been astonished, but it is cat instinct to hang quietly when lifted
in this wise. It made no more than a muffled protest; it hung in a
furry ball, head drawn up, paws close against its body.
Job brought the cat gravely to Chet’s knee, and Chet took it from his
mouth and soothed it and applauded Job.
“I’ll give you five hundred for that dog,” said Hayes.
“You don’t want to buy him,” Chet replied slowly, and the two men saw
that there was a fierce pride in his eyes.
V
A dog does not live as long as a man and this natural law is the fount
of many tears. If boy and puppy might grow to manhood and doghood
together, and together grow old, and so in due course die, full many a
heartache might be avoided. But the world is not so ordered, and dogs
will die and men will weep for them so long as there are dogs and men.
A setter may live a dozen years--may live fifteen. Job lived fourteen
years. But the years of his prime were only seven, less than his share,
for in his sixth year he had distemper and hunted not at all then or the
year thereafter. For months through his long convalescence he was too
weak to walk and Chet used to go in the morning and lift the dog from
his bed in the barn into a wheelbarrow; and he would wheel Job around
into the sun where he might lie quietly the long day through. But in his
eighth year he was himself again--and in his ninth and tenth he hunted.
When he was eleven years old his eyes failed him. The eye is the first
target of old age in a setter. It fails while the nose is still keen. In
August of Job’s eleventh year he went into the fields with Chet one day
when Chet was haying, and because the day was fine the dog was full of
life, went at a gallop to and fro across the field.
Chet had begun to fear that Job was aging; he watched the dog now,
somewhat reassured; and he said to Jim Saladine, who was helping him,
“There’s life in the old dog yet.”
“Look at that!” said Saladine.
But Chet had seen. Job going full tilt across the field had run headlong
into a bowlder as big as a barrel, which rose three feet above the
stubble. He should have seen it clear across the field; he had not seen
it at all. They heard his yelp of pain at the blow upon his tender nose
and saw him get up and totter in aimless circles. Chet ran toward him,
comforted him.
The dog was not stone blind, but his sight was almost gone. It must have
gone suddenly, though Chet looking backward could see that he should
have guessed before. Job was half stunned by the blow he had received
and he followed Chet to the barn and lay down on a litter of hay there
and seemed glad to rest. Chet, his eyes opened by what had happened,
seemed to see the marks of age very plain upon the old dog of a sudden.
He took him into the covers that fall once or twice and Job’s nose
functioned as marvelously as ever. But Chet could not bear to see the
old dog blundering here and there, colliding with every obstacle that
offered itself. After the third trial he gave up and hunted no more
that fall. He even refused to go out with others when they brought their
dogs.
“My old Job can’t hunt any more,” he would say. “I don’t seem to enjoy
it any more myself. I guess I’ll not go out to-day.”
Hayes was one of those who tried to persuade Chet to take the field. An
abiding friendship had grown up between these two. And late in October
Hayes brought another puppy to the farm.
“He’ll never be the dog Job was,” he told Chet. “But he’s a well-blooded
dog.”
“There won’t ever be another Job,” Chet agreed. “But--I’m obliged for
the puppy--and he’ll be company for Job.”
He called the new dog Mac and he set about Mac’s training that winter,
but his heart was not in it. That Job should grow old made Chet feel his
own years heavy upon him. He was still in middle life, as hale as any
man of twenty. But--Job was growing old and Chet’s heart was heavy.
Mary Thurman in the village--it was she whom Job called his
mistress--saw the sorrow in Chet. She was full of sympathetic
understanding of the man. They were as truly one as though they had been
married these dozen years.
Annie Bissell, Will Bissell’s wife, said to her once: “Why don’t you
marry him, Mary? Land knows, you’ve loved him long enough.”
Mary Thurman told her: “He don’t need me. He’s always lived alone and
been comfortable enough and never known the need of a woman. I’ll marry
no man that don’t know he needs me and tells me so.”
“Land knows, he needs someone to rid up that house of his. It’s a mess,”
the other woman said.
“Chet don’t need me,” Mary insisted. “When he needs me I reckon I’ll go
to him.”
She saw now the sorrow in Chet’s eyes and she tried to talk him out of
it and to some extent succeeded.
Chet laughed a little, rubbed Job’s head, said slowly: “I hate to see
the old dog get old, that’s all.”
“Sho,” said Mary, “he’s just beginning to enjoy living. Don’t have to
work any more.”
In the end she did bring some measure of comfort to Chet. And it was she
who christened Job anew. He and Chet came down one evening, stopped on
their way for the mail, and she greeted Chet and to the dog said,
“Hello, Old Tantrybogus.”
Chet looked at her, asked what she meant.
“Nothing,” Mary told him. “He just looks like an old tantrybogus, that’s
all.”
“What is a tantrybogus?” Chet asked. “I don’t believe there’s any such
thing.”
“Well, if there was he’d look like one,” said Mary.
The name took hold. Mary always used it; Chet himself took it up. By the
time Job was twelve years old he was seldom called anything else.
Chet had expected that Mac, the young dog, would prove a companion for
Job, but at first it seemed he would be disappointed. To begin with,
Job was jealous; he sulked when Chet paid Mac attention and was a
scornful spectator at Mac’s training sessions. This early jealousy came
to a head about the time Mac got his full stature--in a fight over a
field mouse. It happened in the orchard, where Chet was piling hay round
his trees. Mac dug the mouse out of the grass, Old Tantrybogus stole it
and Mac went for him.
Tantry was old, but strength was still in him, and some measure of
craft. He got a neck hold and it is probable he would have killed Mac
then and there if Chet had not interfered. As it was, Chet broke the
hold, punished both dogs and chained them up for days till by every
language a dog can muster they promised him to behave themselves. They
never fought again. Mac had for Tantry a deep respect; Job had for
Mac--having established his ascendancy--a mild and elderly affection.
In Tantry’s thirteenth year during the haying Mac caught a mouse one day
and brought it and gave it to the older dog; and Chet, who saw the
incident, slapped his knee and cried, “Now ain’t that comical?”
About his twelfth year old Tantry’s bark had begun to change. Little by
little it lost the deeper notes of the years of his prime; it lost the
certainty and decision which were always a part of the dog. It began to
crack, as an old man’s voice quavers and cracks. A shrill querulous note
was born in it. Before he was thirteen his bark had an inhuman sound and
Chet could hardly bear to hear it. On gunning days while Chet was
preparing to take the field with Mac, Old Tantrybogus would dance
unsteadily round him, barking this hoarse, shrill, delighted bark.
It was like seeing an old man gamboling; it was age aping youth. There
was something pitiful in it, and Chet used to swear and chain Tantry to
his kennel and bid him--abusively--be still.
The chain always silenced Tantry. He would lie in the kennel, head on
his paws in the doorway, and watch Chet and Mac start away, with never a
sound. And at night when they came home Chet would show him the birds
and Tantry would snuffle at them eagerly, then hide his longing under a
mask of condescension as though to say that woodcock had been of better
quality in his day.
In his thirteenth year age overpowered Tantry. His coat by this time was
long; it hung in fringes from his thin flanks, through which the arched
ribs showed. His head drooped, his tail dragged; his long hair was
clotted into tangles here and there, because he was grown too old to
keep himself in order. The joints of his legs were weak and he was
splayfooted, his feet spreading out like braces on either side of him.
When he walked he weaved like a drunken man; when he ran he collided
with anything from a fence post to the barn itself. His eyes were
rheumy. And he was pathetically affectionate, pushing his nose along
Chet’s knee, smearing Chet’s trousers with his long white hairs. In his
prime he had been a proud dog, caring little for caresses. This senile
craving for the touch of Chet’s hand made Chet cry--and swear. It was
at this time that Mary Thurman told Chet he ought to put Tantrybogus
away.
“He’s too old for his own good,” she said--“half sick, and sore and
uncomfortable. He ain’t happy, Chet.”
Chet told her that he would--some day. But the day did not come, and
Mary knew it would not come. Nevertheless she urged Chet more than once
to do the thing.
“You ought to. He’d be happier,” she said--“and so would you. You ain’t
happy with him around.”
Chet laughed at her.
“I guess Old Tantry won’t bother me long as he wants to live,” he said.
“He makes you feel like an old man, Chet McAusland, just to look at
him,” she protested. But Chet shook his head.
“I won’t feel old long as I can see you,” he told her.
So Old Tantry lived on and grew more decrepit. One day in the winter of
his thirteenth year he followed Chet down into the wood lot and hunted
him out there--and was so weary from his own exertions that Chet had to
carry the dog up the hill and home and put him to bed in the barn.
“I ought to put you away, Tantry,” he said to himself as he gave the
weary old creature a plate of supper. “It’s time you were going, old
dog. But I can’t--I can’t.”
His fourteenth year saw Tantrybogus dragging out a weary life. Till then
there had been nothing the matter with him save old age, but in his
fourteenth summer a lump appeared on his right side against the ribs,
and it was as large as a nut before Chet one day discovered it.
Thereafter it grew. And at times when the old dog lay down on that side
he would yelp with pain and get up hurriedly and lie down on the other
side. By September the lump was half as large as an apple. And when Chet
touched it Tantry whined and licked Chet’s hand in a pitiful appeal.
Even then Chet would not do that which Mary wished him to do.
“He’ll go away some day and I’ll never see him again,” he told her. “But
as long as he wants to stay--he’ll stay.”
“It’s cruel to the dog,” Mary told him. “You keep him, but you won’t let
him do what he wants to do. I’m ashamed of you, Chet McAusland.”
Chet laughed uncomfortably.
“I can’t help it, Mary,” he said.