Читать книгу The Dog Who Wouldn't Be - Farley Mowat - Страница 8

IN THE FALL of the year Father and I began making preparations for our first hunting season in the west. The weeks before the season opened were full of intense excitement and anticipation for me, and the ordeal of school was almost unendurable. The nights grew colder and in the hours before the dawn I would waken and lie with a fast-beating heart listening to the majestic chanting of the first flocks of south-bound geese. I kept my gun—a little twenty-gauge (the first shotgun I had ever owned)—on the bed beside me. In the sounding darkness I would lift it to my shoulder and the room and ceiling would dissolve as the gun muzzle swung on the track of the great voyagers.

Father was even more excited than I. Each evening he would get out his own gun, carefully polish the glowing walnut stock, and pack and repack the cartridges in their containers. Mother would sit and watch him with that infuriating attitude of tolerance that women can turn into a devastating weapon against their mates. Mutt, on the other hand, paid no attention to our preparations and, in fact, he grew so bored by them that he took to spending his evenings away from home. His complete lack of interest in guns and decoys and shells and hunting clothes disgusted Father, but at the same time righteously confirmed his original estimate of Mutt.

“We’ll have to hunt without a dog, Farley,” he said gloomily to me one evening.

Mother, for whom this remark was actually intended, rose to the bait.

“Nonsense,” she replied. “You’ve got Mutt—all you have to do is train him.”

Father snorted derisively. “Mutt, indeed! We need a bird dog, not a bird brain.”

I was stung by this reflection on Mutt’s intelligence. “I think he must have bird dog in him somewhere,” I said. “Look at all his ‘feathers’—like a real English setter.”

Father fixed me with a stern glance and beckoned me to follow him out to the garage. When we were safely in that sanctuary he shut the door.

“You’ve been listening to your mother again,” he accused me in a tone that emphasized the gravity of this breach of masculine loyalty.

“Not really listening,” I apologized. “She only said we ought to try him out, and maybe he might be some good.”

Father gave me a pitying look. “You’ve missed the point,” he explained. “Surely you’re old enough by now to realize that it never pays to let a woman prove she’s right. It doesn’t even pay to give her a chance to prove it. Mutt stays home.”

My father’s logic seemed confusing, but I did not argue. And so that first season we went out to the fields and sloughs without a dog. In the event, it was probably just as well. Both my father and I had a great deal to learn about hunting, and the process would have been impossibly complicated had we been attempting to train a dog at the same time.

On opening day Father and I were up long before dawn (we never really went to bed that night) and, having loaded the gun cases and all our paraphernalia into Eardlie’s rumble seat, we drove through the grave desolation of the sleeping city into the open plains beyond. We drove in the making of the dawn along the straight-ruled country roads, and the dust boiled and heaved in Eardlie’s wake, glowing bloody in the diffused reflection of the taillight. Occasional jack rabbits made gargantuan leaps in the cones of the headlights, or raced beside us in the ditches as ghostly outriders to the speeding little car.

The fields on either side had long since been reaped, and the grain threshed. Now the stubble was pallid and unliving, as gray as an old man’s beard, in the breaking dawn. The tenuous, almost invisible lines of barbed-wire fences drew to a horizon that was unbroken except for the blunt outlines of grain elevators in unseen villages at the world’s edge. Occasionally we passed a poplar bluff, already naked save for a few doomed clusters of yellowed leaves. Rarely, there was a farmhouse, slab-sided, gray, and worn by driven dust and winter gales.

I suppose it was a bleak landscape and yet it evoked in me a feeling of infinite freedom and of release that must be incomprehensible to those who dwell in the well-tamed confines of the east. We saw no ugliness, and felt no weight of desolation. In a mood of exaltation we watched the sun leap to the horizon while the haze of fading dust clouds flared in a splendid and untrammeled flow of flame.

Many times since that morning I have seen the dawn sun on the prairie, but the hunger to see it yet again remains unsatisfied.

We turned eastward at last and drove with the sun in our eyes, and little Eardlie scattered the dust under his prancing wheels, and it was morning. My impatience could no longer be contained.

“Where do we find the birds?” I asked.

Father met my question with studied nonchalance. For almost a year he had been imbibing the lore of upland hunting. He had read many books on the subject and he had talked to a score of old-time hunters and he believed that he had already achieved expert status.

“It depends what birds you’re after,” he explained. “Since the chicken season isn’t open yet, we’re looking for Huns”—he used these colloquial names for prairie chicken and Hungarian partridge with an easy familiarity—“and Huns like to come out to the roads at dawn to gravel-up. We’ll see them any time.”

I mulled this over. “There isn’t any gravel on these roads—only dust,” I said, with what seemed to me like cogent logic.

“Of course there isn’t any gravel,” Father replied shortly. “Gravel-up is just an expression. In this case it obviously means taking a dust bath. Now keep your eyes skinned, and don’t talk so much.”

There was no time to pursue the matter, for a moment later Father trod hard on the brakes and Eardlie squealed a little and jolted to a halt.

“There they are!” my father whispered fiercely. “You stay near the car. I’ll sneak up the ditch and flush them down the road toward you.”

The light was brilliant now, but though I strained my eyes, I caught no more than a glimpse of a few grayish forms scurrying into the roadside ditch some forty yards ahead of us. Nevertheless, I loaded my gun, leaped out of the car in a fury of excitement, and crouched down by the front fender. Father had already started up the ditch, shotgun cradled in one arm, and his face almost buried in the dry vegetation. He was soon out of my sight, and for some time nothing moved upon the scene except a solitary gopher that lifted its head near a fence post and whistled derisively.

I thought that it seemed to be taking Father an interminable time, but then I did not know that he was having his first experience with Russian thistles. These are frightful weeds whose dried and thorny carcasses roll for miles across the plains each autumn, to pile up in impenetrable thickets behind the fences or in the deep roadside ditches. There had been a bumper crop of Russian thistles that year and the ditch through which Father’s path lay was choked with them.

He suffered agonies, yet he persevered. Suddenly he burst out of the ditch, leveled his gun at a whirring cluster of rocketing birds, and accidentally fired both barrels at once. He disappeared again immediately, for the double recoil of a twelve-gauge shotgun is quite as formidable as a hard right to the jaw.

As Father had predicted they would, the Huns flew straight down the road toward me. I was too excited to remember to release the safety catch, but it did not matter. As the birds passed overhead I recognized them for as pretty a bevy of meadow larks as I have ever seen.

Father came back to the car after a while, and we drove on. He steered with one hand and picked thistles out of his face with the other. I did not speak, for I had a certain intuition that silence would be safer.

Nevertheless, our first day afield was not without some success. Toward evening we encountered a covey of birds and Father killed two of them with a magnificent crossing shot at thirty yards’ range. We were a proud pair of hunters as we drove homeward. As we were unloading the car in front of the house, Father observed the approach of one of our neighbors and with pride held up the brace of birds to be admired.

The neighbor, a hunter of many years’ experience, was impressed. He almost ran to the car and, snatching the birds out of my father’s hand, he muttered:

“For God’s sake, Mowat, hide those damn things quick! Don’t you know the prairie-chicken season doesn’t open for a week?”

Father and I learned a good deal that first autumn. We learned that the Hungarian partridge is the wiliest of birds—bullet-swift when on the wing, and approaching a gazelle in speed when running through dense cover on the ground. We became inured to the violent explosions of prairie chickens bursting out of the tall slough grass. We learned that there is only one duck that reputable western hunters deign to shoot—and that is the green-head mallard. We learned this last lesson so well that it was almost our undoing. That was on an October day when we found ten green-heads feeding placidly in a slough a few rods from an apparently abandoned farm-house. Although they seemed a little larger than the ones we had fruitlessly pursued all through the season, we never dreamed that they had an owner who was also a deputy game warden; or that any man could have such an inflated idea of the value of his livestock. At that, we escaped lightly, for the owner would undoubtedly have charged us with exceeding the bag limits—if there had been such a limit on domestic ducks.

That first season conclusively demonstrated that we really needed the services of a bird dog—if not a pointer, then at least a good retriever. We lost a number of partridge that were only winged and that ran for cover. On one occasion we came close to losing Father when he waded out into a quicksand slough to retrieve what later was identified as a double-crested cormorant. The memory of the lost birds and, in particular, of the quicksand sat heavily on Father through the following year and gave new weight to Mother’s arguments as a new hunting season approached. She had a sublime faith in Mutt. Or perhaps she was just being stubborn.

My father’s retreat was slow, and defended by rearguard actions. “Mutt’s so obviously not a hunting dog!” he would insist as he retired a few more paces to the rear.

“Nonsense!” Mother would reply. “You know perfectly well that once Mutt makes up his mind, he can do anything. You’ll see.”

I do not think that Father ever publicly hoisted the surrender flag. Nothing was said in so many words, but as the next hunting season drew near, it seemed to be tacitly understood that Mutt would have his chance. Mutt suspected that something unusual was afoot, but he was uncertain as to its nature. He watched curiously as Father and I salvaged our precious hunting trousers from the pile of old clothing that Mother had set aside to give to the Salvation Army (this was an annual ritual); and he sat by, looking perplexed, as we cleaned our guns and repainted the wooden duck decoys. As opening day drew closer he began to show something approaching interest in our preparations, and he even began to forgo his nightly routine check on the neighborhood garbage cans. Mother was quick to point out that this behavior indicated the awakening of some inherited sporting instinct in him. “He’s started to make up his mind,” Mother told us. “You wait—you’ll see!”

We had not long to wait. Opening day was on a Saturday and the previous afternoon a farmer who had come to know my father through the library telephoned that immense flocks of mallards were in his stubble fields. The place was a hundred miles west of the city, so we decided to leave on Friday evening and sleep out at the farm.

We left Saskatoon at dusk. Mutt entered the car willingly enough and, having usurped the outside seat, relapsed into a dyspeptic slumber. It was too dark to see gophers, and it was too cold to press his bulbous nose into the slip stream in search of new and fascinating odors, so he slept, noisily, as Eardlie jounced over the dirt roads across the star-lit prairie. Father and I felt no need of sleep. Ahead of us we knew the great flocks were settling for the night, but we also knew that with the dawn they would lift from the wide fields for the morning flight to a nearby slough where they would quench their thirst and gossip for a while, before returning to the serious business of gleaning the wheat kernels left behind by the threshing crews.

Reaching our destination at midnight, we turned from the road and drove across the fields to a haystack that stood half a mile from the slough. The penetrating warning of an early winter had come with darkness, and we had long hours to wait until the dawn. I burrowed into the side of the stack, excavating a cave for the three of us, while Father assembled the guns by the dim yellow flare of Eardlie’s lights. When all was ready for the morrow Father joined me and we rolled ourselves in our blankets, there in the fragrant security of our straw cave.

I could look out through the low opening. There was a full moon—the hunter’s moon—and as I watched I could see the glitter of frost crystals forming on Eardlie’s hood. Somewhere far overhead—or perhaps it was only in my mind—I heard the quivering sibilance of wings. I reached out my hand and touched the cold, oily barrel of my gun lying in the straw beside me; and I knew a quality of happiness that has not been mine since that long-past hour.

Mutt did not share my happiness. He was never fond of sleeping out, and on this chill night there was no pleasure for him in the frosty fields or in that shining sky. He was suspicious of the dubious comforts of our cave, suspecting perhaps that it was some kind of trap, and he had refused to budge from the warm seat of the car.

An hour or so after I had dozed off I was abruptly awakened when, from somewhere near at hand, a coyote lifted his penetrating quaver into the chill air. Before the coyote’s song had reached the halfway mark, Mutt shot into the cave, ricocheted over Father, and came to a quivering halt upon my stomach. I grunted under the impact, and angrily heaved him off. There followed a good deal of confused shoving and pushing in the darkness, while Father muttered scathing words about “hunting dogs” that were frightened of a coyote’s wail. Mutt did not reply, but, having pulled down a large portion of the straw roof upon our heads, curled up across my chest and feigned sleep.

I was awakened again before dawn by a trickle of straw being dislodged upon me by exploring mice, and by the chatter of juncos in the stubble outside the cave. I nudged my father and sleepily we began the battle with greasy boots and moisture-laden clothing. Mutt was in the way. He steadfastly refused to rise at such an ungodly hour, and in the end had to be dragged out of the warm shelter. Whatever hunting instincts he had inherited seemed to have atrophied overnight. We were not sanguine about his potential value to us as we cooked our breakfast over the hissing blue flame of a little gasoline stove.

When at length we finished our coffee and set off across the frost-brittle stubble toward the slough, Mutt grudgingly agreed to accompany us only because he did not wish to be left behind with the coyotes.

It was still dark, but there was a faint suggestion of a gray luminosity in the east as we felt our way through the bordering poplar bluffs to the slough and to a reed duck-blind that the farmer had built for us. The silence seemed absolute and the cold had a rare intensity that knifed through my clothes and left me shivering at its touch. Wedged firmly between my knees, as we squatted behind the blind, Mutt also shivered, muttering gloomily the while about the foolishness of men and boys who would deliberately expose themselves and their dependents to such chill discomfort.

I paid little heed to his complaints, for I was watching for the dawn. Shaken by excitement as much as by the cold, I waited with straining eyes and ears while an aeon passed. Then, with the abruptness of summer lightning, the dawn was on us. Through the blurred screen of leafless trees I beheld the living silver of the slough, miraculously conjured out of the dark mists. The shimmering surface was rippled by the slow, waking movements of two green-winged teal, and at the sight of them my heart thudded with a wild beat. My gloved hand tightened on Mutt’s collar until he squirmed, and I glanced down at him and saw, to my surprise, that his attitude of sullen discontent had been replaced by one of acute, if somewhat puzzled, interest. Perhaps something of what I myself was feeling had been communicated to him, or perhaps Mother had been right about his inheritance. I had no time to think upon it, for the flight was coming in.

We heard it first—a low and distant vibration that was felt as much as heard, but that soon grew to a crescendo of deep-pitched sound, as if innumerable artillery shells were rushing upon us through the resisting air. I heard Father’s wordless exclamation and, peering over the lip of the blind, I saw the yellow sky go dark as a living cloud obscured it. And then the massed wings enveloped us and the sound was the roar of a great ocean beating into the caves of the sea.

As I turned my face up in wonderment to that incredible vision, I heard Father whisper urgently, “They’ll circle once at least. Hold your fire till they start pitching in.”

Now the whole sky was throbbing with their wings. Five—ten thousand of them perhaps, they banked away and the roar receded, swelled and renewed itself, and the moment was almost at hand. I let go of Mutt’s collar in order to release the safety catch on my shotgun.

Mutt went insane.

That, anyway, is the most lenient explanation I can give for what he did. From a sitting start he leaped straight up into the air high enough to go clear over the front of the blind, and when he hit the ground again he was running at a speed that he had never before attained, and never would again. And he was vocal. Screaming and yelping with hysterical abandon, he looked, and sounded, like a score of dogs.

Father and I fired at the now rapidly receding flocks, but that was no more than a gesture—a release for our raging spirits. Then we dropped the useless guns and hurled terrible words after our bird dog.

We might as well have saved our breath. I do not think he even heard us. Straight over the shining fields he flew, seemingly almost air-borne himself, while the high flight of frightened ducks cast its shadow over him. He became a steadily diminishing dot in an illimitable distance, and then he vanished and the world grew silent.

The words we might have used, one to the other, as we sat down against the duck blind, would all have been inadequate. We said nothing. We simply waited. The sun rose high and red and the light grew until it was certain that there would be no more ducks that morning, and then we went back to the car and brewed some coffee. And then we waited.

He came back two hours later. He came so circumspectly (hugging the angles of the fences) that I did not see him until he was fifty yards away from the car. He was a sad spectacle. Dejection showed in every line from the dragging tail to the abject flop of his ears. He had evidently failed to catch a duck.

For Father that first experience with Mutt was bitter-sweet. True enough we had lost the ducks—but as a result my father was in a fair way to regain the initiative against Mother on the home front. This first skirmish had gone his way. But he was not one to rest on victory. Consequently, during the first week of the season we shot no birds at all, while Mutt demonstrated with what seemed to be an absolute certainty that he was not, and never would be, a bird dog.

It is true that Mutt, still smarting from the failure of his first effort, tried hard to please us, yet it seemed to be impossible for him to grasp the real point of our excursions into the autumnal plains.

On the second day out he decided that we must be after gophers and he spent most of that day digging energetically into their deep burrows. He got nothing for his trouble save an attack of asthma from too much dust in his nasal passages.

The third time out he concluded that we were hunting cows.

That was a day that will live long in memory. Mutt threw himself into cow chasing with a frenzy that was almost fanatical. He became, in a matter of hours, a dedicated dog. It was a ghastly day, yet it had its compensations for Father. When we returned home that night, very tired, very dusty—and sans birds—he was able to report gloatingly to Mother that her “hunting dog” had attempted to retrieve forty-three heifers, two bulls, seventy-two steers, and an aged ox belonging to a Dukhobor family.

It must have seemed to my father that his early judgment of Mutt was now unassailable. But he should have been warned by the tranquility with which Mother received his account of the day’s events.

Mother’s leap from the quaking bog to rock-firm ground was so spectacular that it left me breathless; and it left Father so stunned that he could not even find a reply.

Mother smiled complacently at him.

“Poor, dear Mutt,” she said. “He knows the dreadful price of beef these days.”