Lad: A Dog Part 37

The third was Rex--a giant, a freak, a dog oddly out of place among a group of thoroughbreds. On his father's side Rex was pure collie; on his mother's, pure bull-terrier. That is an accidental blending of two breeds which cannot blend. He looked more like a fawn-colored Great Dane than anything else. He was short-haired, full two inches taller and ten pounds heavier than Lad, and had the bunch-muscled jaws of a killer.

There was not an outlander dog for two miles in either direction that Rex had not at one time or another met and vanquished. The bull-terrier strain, which blended so ill with collie blood, made its possessor a terrific fighter. He was swift as a deer, strong as a puma.

In many ways he was a lovable and affectionate pet; slavishly devoted to the Master and grievously jealous of the latter's love for Lad. Rex was five years old--in his fullest prime--and, like the rest, he had ever taken Lad's rulers.h.i.+p for granted.

I have written at perhaps prosy length, introducing these characters of my war-story. The rest is action.

March, that last year, was a month of drearily recurrent snows. In the forests beyond The Place, the snow lay light and fluffy at a depth of sixteen inches.

On a snowy, blowy, bitter cold Sunday--one of those days n.o.body wants--Rex and Wolf elected to go rabbit-hunting.

Bruce was not in the hunt, sensibly preferring to lie in front of the living-room fire on so vile a day rather than to flounder through dust-fine drifts in search of game that was not worth chasing under such conditions. Wolf, too, was monstrous comfortable on the old fur rug by the fire, at the Mistress' feet.

But Rex, who had waxed oddly restless of late, was bored by the indoor afternoon. The Mistress was reading; the Master was asleep. There seemed no chance that either would go for a walk or otherwise amuse their four-footed friends. The winter forests were calling. The powerful crossbred dog would find the snow a scant obstacle to his hunting. And the warmly quivering body of a new-caught rabbit was a tremendous lure.

Rex got to his feet, slouched across the living-room to Bruce and touched his nose. The drowsing collie paid no heed. Next Rex moved over to where Wolf lay. The two dogs' noses touched.

Now, this is no _Mowgli_ tale, but a true narrative. I do not pretend to say whether or not dogs have a language of their own. (Personally, I think they have, and a very comprehensive one, too. But I cannot prove it.) No dog-student, however, will deny that two dogs communicate their wishes to each other in some way by (or during) the swift contact of noses.

By that touch Wolf understood Rex's hint to join in the foray. Wolf was not yet four years old--at an age when excitement still outweighs lazy comfort. Moreover, he admired and aped Rex, as much as ever the school's littlest boy models himself on the cla.s.s bully. He was up at once and ready to start.

A maid was bringing in an armful of wood from the veranda. The two dogs slipped out through the half-open door. As they went, Wolf cast a sidelong glance at Lad, who was snoozing under the piano. Lad noted the careless invitation. He also noted that Wolf did not hesitate when his father refused to join the outing but trotted gayly off in Rex's wake.

Perhaps this defection hurt Lad's abnormally sensitive feelings. For of old he had always led such forest-runnings. Perhaps the two dogs'

departure merely woke in him the memory of the chase's joys and stirred a longing for the snow-clogged woods.

For a minute or two the big living-room was quiet, except for the scratch of dry snow against the panes, the slow breathing of Bruce and the turning of a page in the book the Mistress was reading. Then Lad got up heavily and walked forth from his piano-cave.

He stretched himself and crossed to the Mistress' chair. There he sat down on the rug very close beside her and laid one of his ridiculously tiny white fore-paws in her lap. Absent-mindedly, still absorbed in her book, she put out a hand and patted the soft fur of his ruff and ears.

Often, Lad came to her or to the Master for some such caress; and, receiving it, would return to his resting-place. But to-day he was seeking to attract her notice for something much more important. It had occurred to him that it would be jolly to go with her for a tramp in the snow. And his mere presence failing to convey the hint, he began to "talk."

To the Mistress and the Master alone did Lad condescend to "talk"--and then only in moments of stress or appeal. No one, hearing him, at such a time, could doubt the dog was trying to frame human speech. His vocal efforts ran the gamut of the entire scale. Wordless, but decidedly eloquent, this "talking" would continue sometimes for several minutes without ceasing; its tones carried whatever emotion the old dog sought to convey--whether of joy, of grief, of request or of complaint.

To-day there was merely playful entreaty in the speechless "speech."

The Mistress looked up.

"What is it, Laddie?" she asked. "What do you want?"

For answer Lad glanced at the door, then at the Mistress; then he solemnly went out into the hall--whence presently he returned with one of her fur gloves in his mouth.

"No, no," she laughed. "Not to-day, Lad. Not in this storm. We'll take a good, long walk to-morrow."

The dog sighed and returned sadly to his lair beneath the piano. But the vision of the forests was evidently hard to erase from his mind. And a little later, when the front door was open again by one of the servants, he stalked out.

The snow was driving hard, and there was a sting in it. The thermometer was little above zero; but the snow had been a familiar bedfellow, for centuries, to Lad's Scottish forefathers; and the cold was harmless against the woven thickness of his tawny coat. Picking his way in stately fas.h.i.+on along the ill-broken track of the driveway, he strolled toward the woods. To humans there was nothing in the outdoor day but snow and chill and bl.u.s.ter and bitter loneliness. To the trained eye and the miraculous scent-power of a collie it contained a million things of dramatic interest.

Here a rabbit had crossed the trail--not with leisurely bounds or mincing hops, but stomach to earth, in flight for very life. Here, close at the terrified bunny's heels, had darted a red fox. Yonder, where the piling snow covered a swirl of tracks, the chase had ended.

The little ridge of snow-heaped furrow, to the right, held a basketful of cowering quail--who heard Lad's slow step and did not reckon on his flawless gift of smell. On the hemlock tree just ahead a hawk had lately torn a blue-jay asunder. A fluff of gray feathers still stuck to a bough, and the scent of blood had not been blown out of the air. Underneath, a field-mouse was plowing its way into the frozen earth, its tiny paw-sc.r.a.pes wholly audible to the ears of the dog above it.

Here, through the stark and drifted undergrowth, Rex and Wolf had recently swept along in pursuit of a half-grown rabbit. Even a human eye could not have missed their partly-covered tracks; but Lad knew whose track was whose and which dog had been in the lead.

Yes, to humans, the forest would have seemed a deserted white waste. Lad knew it was thick-populated with the Little People of the woodland, and that all day and all night the seemingly empty and placid groves were a blend of battlefield, slaughterhouse and restaurant. Here, as much as in the cities or in the trenches, abode strenuous life, violent death, struggle, greed and terror.

A partridge rocketed upward through a clump of evergreen, while a weasel, jaws a-quiver, glared after it, baffled. A s.h.a.ggy owl crouched at a tree-limb hole and blinked sulkily about in search of prey and in hope of dusk. A crow, its black feet red with a slain s...o...b..rd's blood, flapped clumsily overhead. A poet would have vowed that the still and white-shrouded wilderness was a shrine sacred to solitude and severe peace. Lad could have told him better. Nature (beneath the surface) is never solitary and never at peace.

When a dog is very old and very heavy and a little unwieldy, it is hard to walk through sixteen-inch snow, even if one moves slowly and sedately. Hence Lad was well pleased to come upon a narrow woodland track; made by a laborer who had pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed through that same strip of forest during the last few hours. To follow in that trampled rut made walking much easier; it was a rut barely wide enough for one wayfarer.

More and more like an elderly squire patrolling his acres, Lad rambled along, and presently his ears and his nose told him that his two loving friends Rex and Wolf were coming toward him on their home-bound way. His plumy tail wagged expectantly. He was growing a bit lonely on this Sunday afternoon walk of his, and a little tired. It would be a pleasure to have company--especially Wolf's.

Rex and Wolf had fared ill on their hunt. They had put up two rabbits. One had doubled and completely escaped them; and in the chase Rex had cut his foot nastily on a strip of unseen barbed wire. The sandlike snow had gotten into the jagged cut in a most irritating way.

The second rabbit had dived under a log. Rex had thrust his head fiercely through a s...o...b..nk in quest of the vanished prey; and a long briar-thorn, hidden there, had plunged its needle point deep into the inside of his left nostril. The inner nostril is a hundred-fold the most agonizingly sensitive part of a dog's body, and the pain wrung a yell of rage and hurt from the big dog.

With a nostril and a foot both hurt, there was no more fun in hunting, and--angry, cross, savagely in pain--Rex loped homeward, Wolf pattering along behind him. Like Lad, they came upon the laborer's trampled path and took advantage of the easier going.

Thus it was, at a turn in the track, that they came face to face with Lad. Wolf had already smelled him, and his brush began to quiver in welcome. Rex, his nose in anguish, could smell nothing; not until that turn did he know of Lad's presence. He halted, sulky, and ill-tempered. The queer restlessness, the pre-springtime savagery that had obsessed him of late had been brought to a head by his hurts. He was not himself. His mind was sick.

There was not room for two large dogs to pa.s.s each other in that narrow trail. One or the other must flounder out into the deep snow to the side. Ordinarily, there would be no question about any other dog on The Place turning out for Lad. It would have been a matter of course, and so, to-day, Lad expected it to be. Onward he moved, at that same dignified walk, until he was not a yard away from Rex.

The latter, his brain fevered and his hurts torturing him, suddenly flamed into rebellion. Even as a younger buck sooner or later a.s.sails for mastery the leader of the herd, so the brain-sick Rex went back, all at once, to primal instincts, a maniac rage mastered him--the rage of the angry underling, the primitive l.u.s.t for mastery.

With not so much as a growl or warning, he launched himself upon Lad. Straight at the tired old dog's throat he flew. Lad, all unprepared for such unheard-of mutiny, was caught clean off his guard. He had not even time enough to lower his head to protect his throat or to rear and meet his erstwhile subject's attack halfway. At one moment he had been plodding gravely toward his two supposedly loyal friends; the next, Rex's ninety pounds of whale-bone muscle had smitten him violently to earth, and Rex's fearsome jaws--capable of cracking a beef-bone as a man cracks a filbert--had found a vise-grip in the soft fur of his throat.

Down amid a flurry of high-tossed snow, crashed Lad, his snarling enemy upon him, pinning him to the ground, the huge jaws tearing and rending at his ruff--the silken ruff that the Mistress daily combed with such loving care to keep it fluffy and beautiful.

It was a grip and a leverage that would have made the average opponent helpless. With a short-haired dog it would have meant the end, but the providence that gave collies a mattress of fur--to stave off the cold, in their herding work amid the snowy moors--has made that fur thickest about the lower neck.

Rex had struck in crazy rage and had not gauged his mark as truly as though he had been cooler. He had missed the jugular and found himself grinding at an enormous mouthful of matted hair--and at very little else; and Lad belonged to the breed that is never to be taken wholly by surprise and that acts by the swiftest instinct or reason known to dogdom. Even as he fell, he instinctively threw his body sideways to avoid the full jar of Rex's impact--and gathered his feet under him.

With a heave that wrenched his every unaccustomed muscle, Lad shook off the living weight and scrambled upright. To prevent this, Rex threw his entire body forward to reinforce his throat-grip. As a result, a double handful of ruff-hair and a patch of skin came away in his jaws. And Lad was free.

He was free--to turn tail and run for his life from the unequal combat--and that his hero-heart would not let him do. He was free, also, to stand his ground and fight there in the s...o...b..und forest until he should be slain by his younger and larger and stronger foe, and this folly his almost-human intelligence would not permit.

There was one chance and only one--one compromise alone between sanity and honor. And this chance Lad took.

He _would_ not run. He _could_ not save his life by fighting where he stood. His only hope was to keep his face to his enemy, battling as best he could, and all the time keep backing toward home. If he could last until he came within sight or sound of the folk at the house, he knew he would be saved. Home was a full half-mile away and the snow was almost chest-deep. Yet, on the instant, he laid out his plan of campaign and put it into action.

Rex cleared his mouth of the impeding hair and flew at Lad once more--before the old dog had fairly gotten to his feet, but not before the line of defense had been thought out. Lad half wheeled, dodging the snapping jaws by an inch and taking the impact of the charge on his left shoulder, at the same time burying his teeth in the right side of Rex's face.

At the same time Lad gave ground, moving backward three or four yards, helped along by the impetus of his opponent. Home was a half-mile behind him, in an oblique line, and he could not turn to gauge his direction. Yet he moved in precisely the correct angle.

(Indeed, a pa.s.ser-by who witnessed the fight, and the Master, who went carefully over the ground afterward, proved that at no point in the battle did Lad swerve or mistake his exact direction. Yet not once could he have been able to look around to judge it, and his foot-prints showed that not once had he turned his back on the foe.)

The hold Lad secured on Rex's cheek was good, but it was not good enough. At thirteen, a dog's "biting teeth" are worn short and dull, and his yellowed fangs are blunted; nor is the jaw by any means as powerful as once it was. Rex writhed and pitched in the fierce grip, and presently tore free from it and to the attack again, seeking now to lunge over the top of Lad's lowered head to the vital spot at the nape of the neck, where sharp teeth may pierce through to the spinal cord.

Thrice Rex lunged, and thrice Lad reared on his hind legs, meeting the shock with his deep, s.h.a.ggy breast, snapping and slas.h.i.+ng at his enemy and every time receding a few steps between charges. They had left the path now, and were plowing a course through deep snow. The snow was scant barrier to Rex's full strength, but it terribly impeded the steadily backing Lad. Lad's extra flesh, too, was a bad handicap; his wind was not at all what it should have been, and the unwonted exertion began to tell sharply on him.