Читать книгу The Dog Who Wouldn't Be - Farley Mowat - Страница 6

DURING his first few weeks with us Mutt astonished us all by his maturity of outlook. He never really was a puppy, at least not after he came to us. Perhaps the ordeal with the ducks had aged him prematurely; perhaps he was simply born adult in mind. In any case he resolutely eschewed the usual antics of puppyhood. He left behind him no mangled slippers, no torn upholstery, and no stains upon the rugs. He did not wage mock warfare with people’s bare feet, nor did he make the night hideous when he was left to spend the dark hours alone in the kitchen. There was about him, from the first day he came to us, an aura of resolution and restraint, and dignity. He took life seriously, and he expected us to do likewise.

Nor was he malleable. His character was immutably resolved before we ever knew him and, throughout his life, it did not change.

I suspect that at some early moment of his existence he concluded there was no future in being a dog. And so, with the tenacity which marked his every act, he set himself to become something else. Subconsciously he no longer believed that he was a dog at all, yet he did not feel, as so many foolish canines appear to do, that he was human. He was tolerant of both species, but he claimed kin to neither.

If he was unique in attitude, he was also unique in his appearance. In size he was not far from a setter, but in all other respects he was very far from any known breed. His hindquarters were elevated several inches higher than his forequarters; and at the same time he was distinctly canted from left to right. The result was that, when he was approaching, he appeared to be drifting off about three points to starboard, while simultaneously giving an eerie impression of a submarine starting on a crash dive. It was impossible to tell, unless you knew him very well indeed, exactly where he was heading, or what his immediate objective might be. His eyes gave no clue, for they were so close-set that he looked to be, and may have been, somewhat cross-eyed. The total illusion had its practical advantages, for gophers and cats pursued by Mutt could seldom decide where he was aiming until they discovered, too late, that he was actually on a collision course with them.

An even more disquieting physical characteristic was the fact that his hind legs moved at a slower speed than did his front ones. This was theoretically explicable on the grounds that his hind legs were much longer than his forelegs—but an understanding of this explanation could not dispel the unsettling impression that Mutt’s forward section was slowly and relentlessly pulling away from the tardy after-end.

And yet, despite all this, Mutt was not unprepossessing in general appearance. He had a handsome black and white coat of fine, almost silky hair, with exceptionally long “feathers” on his legs. His tail was long, limber, and expressive. Although his ears were rather large and limp, his head was broad and high-domed. A black mask covered all of his face except for his bulbous nose, which was pure white. He was not really handsome, yet he possessed the same sort of dignified grotesquerie which so distinguished Abraham Lincoln and the Duke of Wellington.

He also possessed a peculiar savoir-faire that had a disconcerting effect upon strangers. So strong was Mutt’s belief that he was not simply “dog” that he was somehow able to convey this conviction to human onlookers.

One bitterly cold day in January Mother went down-town to do some post-Christmas shopping and Mutt accompanied her. She parted from him outside the Hudson Bay Department Store, for Mutt had strong antipathies, even in those early months, and one of these was directed against the famous Company of Gentlemen Adventurers. Mother was inside the store for almost an hour, while Mutt was left to shiver on the wind-swept pavement.

When Mother emerged at last, Mutt had forgotten that he had voluntarily elected to remain outside. Instead he was nursing a grievance at what seemed to him to be a calculated indifference to his comfort on my mother’s part. He had decided to sulk, and when he sulked he became intractable. Nothing that Mother would say could persuade him to get up off the frigid concrete and accompany her home. Mother pleaded. Mutt ignored her and fixed his gaze upon the steamed-up windows of the Star Café across the street.

Neither of them was aware of the small audience which had formed around them. There were three Dukhobors in their quaint winter costumes, a policeman enveloped in a buffalo-skin coat, and a dentist from the nearby Medical Arts Building. Despite the cold, these strangers stood and watched with growing fascination as Mother ordered and Mutt, with slightly lifted lip and sotto-voce mutters, adamantly refused to heed. Both of them were becoming exasperated, and the tone of their utterances grew increasingly vehement.

It was at this point that the dentist lost touch with reality. He stepped forward and addressed Mutt in man-to-man tones.

“Oh, I say, old boy, be reasonable!” he said reproachfully.

Mutt replied with a murmur of guttural disdain, and this was too much for the policeman.

“What seems to be the matter here?” he asked.

Mother explained. “He won’t go home. He just won’t go!”

The policeman was a man of action. He wagged his mittened paw under Mutt’s nose. “Can’t you see the lady’s cold?” he asked sternly.

Mutt rolled his eyes and yawned and the policeman lost his temper. “Now, see here,” he cried, “you just move along or, by the gods, I’ll run you in!”

It was fortunate that my father and Eardlie came by at this moment. Father had seen Mutt and Mother in arguments before, and he acted with dispatch, picking them both up almost bodily and pushing them into Eardlie’s front seat. He did not linger, for he had no desire to be a witness to the reactions of the big policeman and of the dentist when they became aware of the fact that they had been arguing with a dog upon a public street.

Arguments with Mutt were almost invariably fruitless. As he grew older he became more vocal and more argumentative. When he was asked to do something which did not please him he would begin to mutter. If he was pressed, the muttering would grow in volume, rising and falling in pitch. It was not a growl nor was it in the least threatening. It was a stubborn bumbling sound, quite indescribable.

It happened that Father was writing a novel that first winter in the west, and he was extremely touchy about being disturbed while working on it.

One evening he was hunched over his portable typewriter in the living room, his face drawn and haggard with concentration, but he was getting very little actually down on paper. Mother and I, recognizing the symptoms, had discreetly retired to the kitchen, but Mutt had remained in the living room, asleep before the open fire.

Mutt was not a silent sleeper. He snored with a peculiar penetrating sound and, being a dog who dreamed actively, his snores were often punctuated by high-pitched yelps as he galloped across the dream prairie in pursuit of a rabbit.

He must have been lucky that evening. Perhaps it was an old and infirm rabbit he was chasing, or perhaps the rabbit slipped and fell. At any rate Mutt closed with it, and instantly the living room reverberated to a horrendous conflict.

Father, blasted so violently from his creative mood, was enraged. He roared at Mutt, who, awakened harshly in the very moment of victory, was inclined to be surly about the interruption.

“Get out, you insufferable beast!” Father yelled at him.

Mutt curled his lip and prepared to argue.

Father was now almost beside himself. “I said out—you animated threshing machine!”

Mutt’s argumentative mutters immediately rose in volume. Mother and I shivered slightly and stared at each other with dreadful surmise.

Our apprehensions were justified by the sound of shattering glass, as a volume of Everyman’s Encyclopedia banged against the dining-room wall, on the wrong side of the French doors. Mutt appeared in the kitchen at almost the same instant. Without so much as a look at us, he thumped down the basement stairs—his whole attitude radiating outrage.

Father was immediately contrite. He followed Mutt down into the cellar, and we could hear him apologizing—but it did no good. Mutt would not deign to notice him for three days. Physical violence in lieu of argument was, to Mutt, a cardinal sin.

He had another exasperating habit that he developed very early in life, and never forgot. When it was manifestly impossible for him to avoid some unpleasant duty by means of argument, he would feign deafness. On occasions I lost my temper and, bending down so that I could lift one of his long ears, would scream my orders at him in the voice of a Valkyrie. But Mutt would simply turn his face toward me with a bland and interrogative look that seemed to say with insufferable mildness, “I’m sorry—did you speak?”

We could not take really effective steps to cure him of this irritating habit, for it was one he shared with my paternal grandfather, who sometimes visited us. Grandfather was stone deaf to anything that involved effort on his part, yet he could hear, and respond to, the word “whiskey” if it was whispered inside a locked bedroom three floors above the chair in which he habitually sat.

It will be clear by now that Mutt was not an easy dog to live with. Yet the intransigence which made it so difficult to cope with him made it even more difficult—and at times well-nigh impossible—for him to cope with the world in general. His stubbornness marked him out for a tragicomic role throughout his life. But Mutt’s struggles with a perverse fate were not, unfortunately, his alone. He involved those about him, inevitably and often catastrophically, in his confused battle with life.

Wherever he went he left deep-etched memories that were alternately vivid with the screaming hues of outrage, or cloudy with the muddy colors of near dementia. He carried with him the aura of a Don Quixote and it was in that atmosphere that my family and I lived for more than a decade.