Читать книгу The Dog Who Wouldn't Be - Farley Mowat - Страница 5

AN OPPRESSIVE darkness shadowed the city of Saskatoon on an August day in 1929. By the clock it was hardly noon. By the sun—but the earth had obliterated the sun. Rising in the new deserts of the southwest, and lifting high on autumnal winds, the desecrated soil of the prairies drifted northward; and the sky grew dark.

In our small house on the outskirts of the city my mother switched on the electric lights and continued with the task of preparing luncheon for my father and for me. Father had not yet returned from his office, nor I from school. Mother was alone with the somber day.

The sound of the doorbell brought her unwillingly from the kitchen into the hall. She opened the front door no more than a few inches, as if expecting the menace of the sky to thrust its way past her into the house.

There was no menace in the appearance of the visitor who waited apologetically on the step. A small boy, perhaps ten years of age, stood shuffling his feet in the gray grit that had been falling soundlessly across the city for a day and a night. He held a wicker basket before him and, as the door opened, he swung the basket forward and spoke in a voice that was husky with the dust and with the expectation of rebuff.

“Missus,” he asked in a pale, high tone, “would you want to buy a duck?”

Mother was a bit nonplussed by this odd echo of a catch phrase that had already withered and staled in the mouths of the comedians of the era. Nevertheless, she looked into the basket and to her astonishment beheld three emaciated ducklings, their bills gaping in the heat, and, wedged between them, a nondescript and bedraggled pup.

She was touched, and curious—although she certainly did not want to buy a duck.

“I don’t think so,” she said kindly. “Why are you selling them?”

The boy took courage and returned her smile.

“I gotta,” he said. “The slough out to the farm is dry. We ate the big ducks, but these were too small to eat. I sold some down to the Chinee Grill. You want the rest, lady? They’re cheap—only a dime each.”

“I’m sorry,” Mother replied. “I’ve no place to keep a duck. But where did you get the little dog?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, him,” he said without much interest. “He was kind of an accident, you might say. I guess somebody dumped him out of a car right by our gate. I brung him with me in case. But dogs is hard to sell.” He brightened up a little as an idea struck him. “Say, lady, you want him? I’ll sell him for a nickel—that way you’ll save a nickel for yourself.”

Mother hesitated. Then almost involuntarily her hand went to the basket. The pup was thirsty beyond thirst, and those outstretched fingers must have seemed to him as fountains straight from heaven. He clambered hastily over the ducks and grabbed.

The boy was quick to sense his advantage and to press it home.

“He likes you, lady, see? He’s yours for just four cents!”

Less than a month had elapsed since my parents and I had come out of the verdant depths of southern Ontario into the arid and dust-shrouded prairies.

It had seemed a foolhardy venture then, for those were the beginnings of the hard times, even in the east; while in the west the hard times—the times of drought and failure—were already old. I do not know what possessed my father to make him exchange the security of his job in Windsor for a most uncertain future as Saskatoon’s librarian. It may be that the name itself, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, attracted him irresistibly. It may have been simply that he was tired of the physical and mental confines of a province grown staid and stolid in its years.

In any case he made his decision in the fall of 1928, and the rest of us acquiesced in it; I, with a high heart and bright anticipation; Mother, with grave reservations and gloomy prophecies.

Father spent that winter building a caravan, a trailer-house which was destined to carry us westward. It was a long winter for me. On Saturdays I joined my father under a shed and here we hammered and sawed industriously, and the caravan took shape. It was an unconventional shape, for my father was a sailor at heart and he had had but little experience in the design of land conveyances. Our caravan was, in reality, a houseboat perched precariously on the four thin wheels of an old Model T chassis. Her aspect was bluff and uncompromising. Her sides towered straight from the frame a full seven feet to a gently cambered deck (which was never referred to as a roof). She was big-boned and buxom, and she dwarfed poor Eardlie—our Model A Ford convertible—as a floating derrick dwarfs the tug which tows it.

Some of Father’s friends used to come by now and again to watch our progress. They never said much, but when they went away it was with much thoughtful shakings of their heads.

Perhaps our caravan was no thing of beauty, but she was at least a thing of comfort. My father was an ingenious builder and he had fitted her cabin with every nautical convenience. There was a compact galley with a primus stove on gimbals, gimbaled lamps, great quantities of locker space, stowage for charts, a Seth Thomas chronometer on the forward bulkhead, two luxurious berths for my parents, and a folding pipe-berth for me. Dishes, our many books, and other loose oddments were neatly and securely racked in fitted cupboards so that even in the wildest weather they could not come adrift.

It was as well that my father took such pains to make the interior seaworthy, for, as we headed westward, we discovered that our wheeled vessel was—as sailors say—more than somewhat crank. Slab-sided and immense, she was the prey of every wind that blew. When a breeze took her from the flank she would sway heavily and, as like as not, scuttle ponderously to the wrong side of the road, pushing poor Eardlie with her. A head wind would force Eardlie into second gear and even then he would have to strain and boil furiously to keep headway on his balky charge. A stern wind was almost as bad, for then the great bulk of the tow would try to override the little car and, failing in this, would push Eardlie forward at speeds which chilled my mother’s heart.

All in all it was a memorable journey for an eight-year-old boy. I had my choice of riding in Eardlie’s rumble seat, where I became the gunner in a Sopwith Camel; or I could ride in the caravan itself and pilot my self-contained rocket into outer space. I preferred the caravan, for it was a private world and a brave one. My folding bunk-bed was placed high up under the rear window, and here I could lie—carefully strapped into place against the effect of negative gravity (and high winds)—and guide my spaceship through the void to those far planets known as Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Dakota.

When we re-entered Canada at the little town of Estevan, I no longer needed to exercise my imagination by conjuring up otherworldly landscapes. The desolation of the southeast corner of Saskatchewan was appalling, and it was terrifyingly real. The dust storms had been at work there for several years and they had left behind them an incipient desert. Here and there the whitening bones of abandoned buildings remained to mark the death of hopes; and the wind-burnished wood of engulfed fences protruded from the drifts of subsoil that were overwhelming the works of man.

We were all subdued. Although my father tried hard to reassure us, saying that things would improve as we went north, I can remember no great improvement in that lunar landscape as we passed through endless little hamlets that appeared to be in the last stages of dry rot, and as we traversed the burning expanses of drought-stricken fields.

Mother was openly mutinous by the time we reached Saskatoon and even my father was a little depressed. But I was at an age when tragedy has no permanent reality. I saw only that here was a land foreign to all my imaginings, and one that offered limitless possibilities for totally new kinds of adventures. I was fascinated by the cracked white saucers that were the dried-up sloughs; by the dusty clusters of poplar trees that, for some reason which still escapes me, were known as bluffs; and by a horizon that was limitless. I well remember the words of an old man at whose farm we stopped to get some water for Eardlie’s heated radiator.

“She’s flat, boy,” he told me. “This country’s flat enough so’s you stand on a gopher hill you can see nigh off to China.” I believed him, and I still do—for, geographers to the contrary, there is no limit to man’s vision on those broad plains.

The innumerable little gophers roused my speculative interest, as did the bitter alkaline waters of the few remaining wells, the great soaring shapes of the hawks that rose from the fence posts by the roadsides, and the quaver of coyotes in the evening that sent a shiver down my back. Even Saskatoon, when we found it at last sprawled in exhausted despair beside the trickle of the river, was pregnant with adventure. Founded not more than three decades earlier, as a tiny temperance outpost of the Methodist faith, it had outgrown its natal influences and had become a city of thirty thousand people who embraced the beliefs and customs of half the countries of the Western world. Many of these, particularly the Dukhobors, Mennonites, and Hutterites, were mystery distilled in the eyes of an eight-year-old from the staid Anglo-Saxon province of Ontario.

Father rented a house for us in the northern sections of the city and this jerry-built little box, which was an incinerator in summer and a polar outpost in the winter, became my home. To me it seemed admirable, for it was close to the outskirts of the city—and having been so recently grafted on the face of the plains, Saskatoon had as yet no outer ring of suburbs. You had but to step off the streetcar at the end of the last row of houses, and you were on virgin prairie. The transition in space and time was abrupt and complete and I could make that transition not only on Saturdays, but on any afternoon when school was over.

If there was one drawback to the new life in Saskatoon, it was that we had no dog. During my lifetime we had owned, or had been owned by, a steady succession of dogs. As a newborn baby I had been guarded by a Border collie named Sapper who was one day doused with boiling water by a vicious neighbor, and who went insane as a result. But there had always been other dogs during my first eight years, until we moved to the west and became, for the moment, dogless. The prairies could be only half real to a boy without a dog.

I began agitating for one almost as soon as we arrived and I found a willing ally in my father—though his motives were not mine.

For many years he had been exposed to the colorful tales of my Great-uncle Frank, who homesteaded in Alberta in 1900. Frank was a hunter born, and most of his stories dealt with the superlative shooting to be had on the western plains. Before we were properly settled in Saskatoon my father determined to test those tales. He bought a fine English shotgun, a shooting coat, cases of ammunition, a copy of the Saskatchewan Game Laws, and a handbook on shotgun shooting. There remained only one indispensable item—a hunting dog.

One evening he arrived home from the library with such a beast in tow behind him. Its name was Crown Prince Challenge Indefatigable. It stood about as high as the dining-room table and, as far as Mother and I could judge, consisted mainly of feet and tongue. Father was annoyed at our levity and haughtily informed us that the Crown Prince was an Irish setter, kennel bred and field trained, and a dog to delight the heart of any expert. We remained unimpressed. Purebred he may have been, and the possessor of innumerable cups and ribbons, but to my eyes he seemed a singularly useless sort of beast with but one redeeming feature. I greatly admired the way he drooled. I have never known a dog who could drool as the Crown Prince could. He never stopped, except to flop his way to the kitchen sink and tank-up on water. He left a wet and sticky trail wherever he went. He had little else to recommend him, for he was moronic.

Mother might have overlooked his obvious defects, had it not been for his price. She could not overlook that, for the owner was asking two hundred dollars, and we could no more afford such a sum than we could have afforded a Cadillac. Crown Prince left the next morning, but Father was not discouraged, and it was clear that he would try again.

My parents had been married long enough to achieve that delicate balance of power which enables a married couple to endure each other. They were both adept in the evasive tactics of marital politics—but Mother was a little more adept.

She realized that a dog was now inevitable, and when chance brought the duck boy—as we afterwards referred to him—to our door on that dusty August day, Mother showed her mettle by snatching the initiative right out of my father’s hands.

By buying the duck boy’s pup, she not only placed herself in a position to forestall the purchase of an expensive dog of my father’s choice but she was also able to save six cents in cash. She was never one to despise a bargain.

When I came home from school the bargain was installed in a soap carton in the kitchen. He looked to be a somewhat dubious buy at any price. Small, emaciated, and caked liberally with cow manure, he peered up at me in a nearsighted sort of way. But when I knelt beside him and extended an exploratory hand he roused himself and sank his puppy teeth into my thumb with such satisfactory gusto that my doubts dissolved. I knew that he and I would get along.

My father’s reaction was of a different kind.

He arrived home at six o’clock that night and he was hardly in the door before he began singing the praises of a springer-spaniel bitch he had just seen. He seemed hardly even to hear at first when Mother interrupted to remark that we already had a dog, and that two would be too many.

When he beheld the pup he was outraged; but the ambush had been well and truly laid and before he could recover himself, Mother unmasked her guns.

“Isn’t he lovely, darling?” she asked sweetly. “And so cheap. Do you know, I’ve actually saved you a hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-six cents? Enough to pay for all your ammunition and for that expensive new gun you bought.”

My father was game, and he rallied quickly. He pointed scornfully at the pup, and in a voice sharp with exasperation he replied:

“But, damn it all—that—that ‘thing’ isn’t a hunting dog!”

Mother was ready for him. “How do you know, dear,” she asked mildly, “until you’ve tried him out?”

There could be no adequate reply to this. It was as impossible to predict what the pup might grow up to be, as it was to deduce what his ancestry might have been. Father turned to me for support, but I would not meet his eye, and he knew then that he had been out-maneuvered.

He accepted defeat with his usual good grace. I can clearly remember, and with awe, what he had to say to some friends who dropped in for a drink not three evenings later. The pup, relatively clean, and already beginning to fatten out a little, was presented to the guests.

“He’s imported,” Father explained in a modest tone of voice. “I understand he’s the only one of his kind in the west. A Prince Albert retriever, you know. Marvelous breed for upland shooting.”

Unwilling to confess their ignorance, the guests looked vaguely knowing. “What do you call him?” one of them asked.

I put my foot in it then. Before my father could reply, I forestalled him.

“I call him Mutt,” I said. And I was appalled by the look my father gave me.

He turned his back on me and smiled confidentially at the guests.

“You have to be rather careful with these highly bred specimens,” he explained, “it doesn’t always do to let them know their kennel names. Better to give them a simple bourgeois name like Sport, or Nipper, or—” and he gagged a trifle—“or even Mutt.”