she did not actually descend into the basement herself—was able to give me a reasonably circumstantial account. It must have been an epic struggle. It lasted almost three hours and the sounds and smells of battle reached Mother, via the hot-air registers, without appreciable diminution. She told me that both my father and Mutt had become hoarse and silent by the end of the second hour, but that the sounds of water sluicing violently back and forth over the basement floor testified clearly that the struggle was not yet at an end.
It was nearly midnight before Father appeared alone at the head of the cellar stairs. He was stripped to the buff, and close to exhaustion. After a stiff drink and a bath of his own, he went to bed without so much as hinting to Mother of the dreadful things that had happened on the dank battleground downstairs.
Mutt spent the balance of the night outside, under the front porch. He was evidently too fatigued even to give vent to his vexation by an immediate return to the dead horse—although he probably had this in mind for the morrow.
But when dawn came, not even the lure of the horse was sufficient to make him forgo his usual morning routine.
It had long been his unvarying habit to spend the hours between dawn and breakfast time going his rounds through the back alleys in the neighborhood. He had a regular route, and he seldom deviated from it. There were certain garbage cans that he never missed, and there were, of course, a number of important telephone poles that had to be attended to. His path used to take him down the alleyway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, thence to the head of the New Bridge, and finally to the rear premises of the restaurants and grocery stores in the neighborhood of the Five Corners. Returning home, he would proceed along the main thoroughfare, inspecting fireplugs en route. By the time he started home, there would usually be a good number of people on the streets, bound across the river to their places of work. Mutt had no intimation of disaster on this particular morning until he joined the throng of south-bound workers.
Mother had no warning either until, at a quarter to eight, the telephone rang. Mother answered it and an irate female voice shouted in her ear, “You people should be put in jail! You’ll see if it’s so funny when I put the law onto you!” The receiver at the other end went down with a crash, and Mother went back to making breakfast. She was always phlegmatic in the early hours, and she assumed that this threatening tirade was simply the result of a wrong number. She actually smiled as she told Father about it over the breakfast table. She was still smiling when the police arrived.
There were two constables, and they were pleasant and polite when Mother answered the door. One of them explained that some “crank” had telephoned the station to report that the Mowats had painted their dog. The policemen were embarrassed, and they hastened to explain that it was the law that all such complaints had to be investigated, no matter how ridiculous they might seem. If Mother would assure them, simply for form’s sake, they said, that her dog was still his natural color, they would gladly depart. Mother at once gave them the requisite assurance, but, feeling somewhat puzzled, she hastened to the dining room to tell my father about it.
Father had vanished. He had not even finished his morning coffee. The sound of Eardlie grunting and snorting in the back alley showed that he was departing in haste.
Mother shrugged her shoulders, and began carrying the dishes out to the kitchen. At that moment Mutt scratched on the screen door. She went to let him in.
Mutt scurried into the house, with his head held low and a look of abject misery about him. He must have had a singularly bad time of it on the crowded street. He fled directly to my room, and vanished under the bed.
Father was not yet at his office when Mother phoned the library. She left an agitated message that he was to return home at once, and then she called the veterinary.
Unfortunately it was the same one who had been called in when Mutt ate the naphtha soap. He came again—but with a hard glint of suspicion in his eye.
Mother met him at the door and rushed him into the bedroom. The two of them tried to persuade Mutt to come out from under the bed. Mutt refused. Eventually the veterinary had to crawl under the bed after him—but he did this with a very poor grace.
When he emerged he was momentarily beyond speech. Mother misinterpreted his silence as a measure of the gravity of Mutt’s condition. She pressed the doctor for his diagnosis. She was not prepared for the tirade he loosed upon her. He forgot all professional standards. When he left the house he was bitterly vowing that he would give up medicine and return to the wheat farm that had spawned him. He was so angry that he quite forgot the bill.
Mother had by now put up with quite enough for one morning, and she was in no condition to be further trifled with when, a few minutes later, Father came cautiously through the back door. He was almost as abject as Mutt had been. He saw the look in my mother’s eye and tried to forestall her.
“I swear I didn’t even guess it would do that,” he explained hastily. “Surely it will wash out?” There was a pleading note in his voice.
The light of a belated understanding began to dawn on Mother. She fixed her husband with her most baleful glare.
“Will what wash out?” she demanded, leaving Father with no room for further evasion.
“The bluing,” said my father humbly.
It was little wonder that Mother was distressed by the time I returned from my holiday. The telephone had rung almost incessantly for three days. Some of the callers were jovial—and these were undoubtedly the hardest to bear. Others were vindictive. Fortunately the reporters from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix were friends of my father’s and, with a notable restraint, they denied themselves the opportunity for a journalistic field day. Nevertheless, there were not many people in Saskatoon who did not know of, and who did not have opinions about, the Mowats and their bright blue dog.
By the time I arrived home Father had become very touchy about the whole affair, and it was dangerous to question him too closely. Nevertheless, I finally dared to ask him how much bluing he had actually used.
“Just a smidgen,” he replied shortly. “Just enough to take that damned yellow tint out of his fur!”
I do not know exactly how much a “smidgen” is, but I do know that when Mother asked me to clean the clogged basement drain a few days later, I removed from it a wad of paper wrappers from at least ten cubes of bluing. Some of them may, of course, have been there for some time.
4
A Flock of Ducks
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
