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.”
5
Mallard-Pool-Mutt
I HAD supposed that after the fiascos of that first week of hunting, Mutt would be banned from all further expeditions. It seemed a logical supposition, even though logic was often the stranger in our home. Consequently I was thoroughly startled one morning to find the relative positions of the antagonists in our family’s battle of the sexes reversed. At breakfast Mother elaborated on her new theme that Mutt was far too sensible to waste his time hunting game birds; and Father replied with the surprising statement that he could train any dog to do anything, and that Mutt could, and would, become the “best damn bird dog in the west!” I thought that my father was being more than usually rash, but he thought otherwise, and so throughout the rest of that season Mutt accompanied us on every shooting trip, and he and Father struggled with one another in a conflict that at times reached epic proportions.
The trouble was that Mutt, having discovered the joys of cattle running, infinitely preferred cows to birds. The task of weaning him away from cattle chasing to an interest in game birds seemed hopeless. Yet Father persevered with such determination that toward the end of the season he began to see some meager prospect of success. On those rare occasions when Mutt allowed us to shoot a bird we would force the corpse into his jaws, or hang it, albatrosslike, about his neck, for him to bring back to the car. He deeply resented this business, for the feathers of upland game birds made him sneeze, and the oily taste of duck feathers evidently gave him a mild form of nausea. Eventually, however, he was persuaded to pick up a dead Hungarian partridge of his own volition, but he did this only because Father had made it clear to him that there would be no more cow chasing that day if he refused to humor us. Finally, on a day in early October, he stumbled on a dead partridge, without having it pointed out to him, and, probably because there were no cows in sight and he was bored, he picked it up and brought it back. That first real retrieve was not an unqualified success, since Mutt did not have what dog fanciers refer to as a “tender mouth.” When we received the partridge we got no more than a bloody handful of feathers. We did not dare complain.
Being determinedly optimistic, we took this incident as a hopeful sign, and redoubled our efforts. But Mutt remained primarily a cow chaser; and it was not until the final week end of the hunting season that the tide began to turn.
As the result of a book-distributing plan which he had organized, my father had become acquainted with an odd assortment of people scattered all through the province. One of these was a Ukrainian immigrant named Paul Sazalisky. Paul owned two sections on the shores of an immense slough known as Middle Lake that lies well to the east of Saskatoon. On Thursday of the last week of the season, Paul phoned Father to report that huge flocks of Canada geese were massing on the lake. He invited us to come out and try our luck.
That was a frigid journey. Snow already lay upon the ground and the north wind was so bitter that Mutt did not leap out after cattle even once. He stayed huddled up on the floor boards over the manifold heater, inhaling gusts of hot air and carbon monoxide.
We arrived at Middle Lake in the early evening and found a wasteland that even to our eyes seemed the essence of desolation. Not a tree pierced the gray emptiness. The roads had subsided into freezing gumbo tracks and they seemed to meander without hope across a lunar landscape. The search for Paul’s farm was long and agonizing.
Paul’s house, when at last we found it, turned out to be a clay-plastered shanty perched like a wart upon the face of the whitened plains. It was unprepossessing in appearance. There were only two rooms, each with a single tiny window—yet it held Paul, his wife, his wife’s parents, Paul’s seven children, and two cousins who had been recruited to help with the pigs. The pigs, as we soon discovered, were the mainstay of the establishment, and their aroma was everywhere. It seemed to me to be a singularly unpleasant odor too—far worse than that usually associated with pigs. But there was a good reason for the peculiarly powerful properties of that memorable stench.
Like most of the immigrants who came from middle
