The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (5 page)

Paul and Father arrived in the little boat a short time later. They hurried ashore and Paul stood looking down at Mutt, who was now swathed in my hunting coat. I was sitting on the goose, and barely managing to keep it under control.

“By God!” Paul said, and there was awe in his voice. “By God! You shoot the
big
gray goose! And
dat dam' dog – he bring him back? By God! I don't believe!”

Mutt wriggled under the coat and one eye opened. Life was returning; for if there was one thing that could stir him from the edge of the grave itself, it was honest praise. He must have recognized Paul's incredulity as the highest praise indeed.

We carried him back to the cabin and when Mrs. Sazalisky heard the story, she gave him a hero's welcome. He was placed beside the red-hot stove and fed enormous quantities of steaming goulash. Only when he had begun to burp uncontrollably from the combination of too much heat and too much food, did his hostess desist from filling up his plate.

We all made much of him, both then and later when we returned home. Never before had Mutt received such adulation, and he found it good. We could not anticipate it at the time, but when the hunting season rolled around a year later, we were to discover that cows, gophers, and even cats (during the shooting season at least) had been erased forever from his list of loves.

Once Mutt had made up his mind to be a bird dog, there was no further question of his being “trained.”

Nothing could have been more superfluous than the attempt. If any training was done at all, then it was Father and I who were the trainees. For Mutt soon displayed an incredible array of hidden talents. And if he was completely unorthodox, he was indisputably brilliant in his new career.

The nature of this new Mutt became apparent on opening day of the duck season in the following year.

By coincidence we had returned once more to the slough where Mutt had disgraced himself on his first hunting expedition. That slough, still nameless then, is now renowned to sportsmen throughout the west as Mallard-Pool-Mutt, and this is the tale of how it got its name.

We did not sleep out on this occasion, but drove direct from home, arriving just in time to hurry into the blind before day broke. We had Mutt on a leash, for his exploit at Middle Lake had not completely erased our memory of the debacle which had resulted from his first visit to the slough. We had hopes that he would redeem himself this time – but we were cautious. We even considered the advisability of muzzling him so that he would not scream the ducks away again; but this ignominy would have been too much for him to bear, and so we risked his voice.

It was a different dawn, and yet the same as that which we had seen two years before. Once more the red glare of the morning sun fell on the immaculate mirror of the pond; and once more there was a pair of ducks – pintails this time – sleepily dabbling among the long reeds by the shore. The same pungent odor of salt and muck – an odor that is tasted rather than smelled – rose to us on the edgings of gray mist along the borders of the slough. And the same taut expectation lay upon us as we waited for the morning flight.

The flight, too, came as it had done before, and as it had probably done since this slough was born. Out of the northern sky, half lit now, the sound of its approach was like a rush of wind.

We crouched lower in the blind and my grip tightened warningly on Mutt's collar. Once more I felt him tremble under my hand, and I was vaguely aware that he was making odd little whimpering cries deep in his throat. But my attention was on the approaching flocks.

They came in with a great “whoosh” as the leaders thrust out their feet and struck and shattered the calm surface of the pool. They came in such numbers that it seemed the slough would be too small to hold them all – and still they came.

There was no premature fusillade this time. Father and I were no longer tyros – and Mutt was securely tethered. We stood up together and the crash of the guns echoed like the hint of distant thunder amidst a swirling hurricane of stiff and frantic wings. It was all over in less than a minute. The sky was clear above us and the silence had returned. Out on the slough eight ducks remained, and five of them were greenhead drakes.

Mutt was almost tearing the leash from my hands as we left the blind. “Let him go,” my father said. “He can't do any harm now. Let's see what he makes of this.”

I slipped the leash. Mutt went through the band of muck and sedge at the water's edge like a kangaroo, in great ungainly leaps. The last jump took him well into deep water, and he began churning forward like an old-fashioned stern-wheeler. There was a wild, almost mad glint in his eyes and he had the look of impetuous resolution about him that belongs naturally to a charging buffalo.

Father and I stared at each other, and then at Mutt, in dumb amaze. But when we saw him reach the first dead duck, snap his teeth fast in a wing tip, and start for shore with it, we knew that we had found us a retrieving dog.

What Mutt had done up to this point was, of course, no more than any good bird dog would have done. But the events that followed unmistakably presaged the flowering of his unique genius.

The signs were blurred at first, for though he brought the first dead duck to shore all right, he made no attempt to deliver it properly into our hands. He simply dropped it on the verge and turned at once to make the next retrieve.

However, as long as he brought the ducks to land, we saw no reason to complain – at least we saw no reason until he had retrieved the three dead ducks and had begun work on the remaining five, all of which were still quite active.

Then he began to have difficulties. It took him several minutes to swim-down the first cripple, but eventually he managed to catch it by a wing tip and drag it to the shore. He deposited it unceremoniously, and at once leaped back into the water. Hard on his heels, the duck followed suit. Mutt did not notice, for his attention was already fixed on another duck in mid-pond.

It was a large slough, and very soft and treacherous near the edge. Try as we might, neither Father nor I could manage to be on hand when Mutt brought the cripples in. Neither could we put the
wounded birds out of their pain, as we should have liked to do, since we were not able to get within gunshot of them. It was all up to Mutt.

By the time he had retrieved fifteen out of the original eight ducks, he was beginning to grow annoyed. His first fresh enthusiasm was wearing thin, but his brain was beginning to function. The next duck he brought ashore followed the routine already established by it and its fellows and, as soon as Mutt's back was turned, waddled into the pond. This time Mutt kept a wary eye cocked over his shoulder, and he saw that he was being had.

Father and I were at the far end of the pond, and we watched to see how he would react now that he knew the worst. Treading water in mid-pond, he turned and stared at us with a look of mingled scorn and disgust, as if to say: “What on earth's the matter with you? You've got legs, haven't you? Expect me to do
all
the work?”

The situation suddenly struck us as being vastly amusing, and we began to laugh. Mutt never could stand being laughed at, though he enjoyed being laughed with; and he turned his back and began to swim to the far end of the pond. We thought for a moment he had abandoned the ducks and was about to take himself off. We were wrong.

With not so much as another glance in our direction, he swam to the far side of the slough, turned about, and painstakingly began to herd all the crippled ducks toward our end of the pond.

When all of them, save one old greenhead which skillfully evaded the roundup by diving, were within easy shotgun range of our position, Mutt turned and swam nonchalantly away again.

We did our duty, but with a strong feeling of unreality upon us. “Do you think he did that on purpose?” Father asked me in awe-struck tones.

Mutt had now gone back for the remaining mallard. This one was a magnificent drake, perhaps the leader of the flight, and he was cunning with his years. His injury must have been slight, for it was all Mutt could do to close the gap between them. And then, when Mutt was near enough to lunge, his teeth snapped shut on nothing but a mouthful of water. The drake had dived again.

We watched as, three times, the drake evaded capture in this manner, leaving Mutt to swim in aimless circles on the surface.

The old bird chose his water, and stayed well away from shore, for he knew about guns. We concluded finally that this was one duck we would not get, and we decided to call Mutt in.

He was growing very weary. As his coat became increasingly water-logged he swam lower and lower, and his speed diminished to the point where he could just manage to overhaul the drake, and that was all. Nevertheless, he ignored us when we called to him, gently at first, and then in commanding tones. We began to be afraid that, in this willful obstinacy, he would drown himself. Father had already begun to strip off his hunting jacket and boots, ready to effect a rescue, when the incredible thing happened.

Mutt had closed with his quarry for the fifth time. The duck waited, and at the last instant again upended and disappeared.

This time Mutt also disappeared.

A swirl of muddy water marked his passing, and in the center of the swirl there was a whitish blob that twisted back and forth lethargically. I recognized it as the tip of Mutt's tail, held aloft by the remaining buoyancy in his long feathers.

Father was already wading through the muck when my startled yell halted him. Together we stood and stared, and could not credit the reality of what we saw.

Mutt had reappeared. Weed festooned his face, and his eyes were bulging horribly. He gasped for
breath and floundered heavily. But between his front teeth was the tip of the drake's wing.

When at last Mutt lay before us, panting and half drowned, we were a humbled and penitent man and boy. I rolled the leash up in my hand and, catching Father's glance, I turned and threw it with all my strength far out into the slough.

It sank with hardly a ripple into the still depths of Mallard-Pool-Mutt.

nce Mutt had fully dedicated himself as a retriever, our hunting expeditions became pure joy, unadulterated by the confusion and chaos which were so much a part of our life in the city. I looked forward hungrily to the days when the brazen harvest would be made, and the fields lie cropped and crisp beneath our boots; the days when the poplar leaves would spin to earth, and the frost would harden the saline muck about the little sloughs; the days when dawn would come like a crystalline shock out of a sky that held no clouds, save those vital ones that were the flocks pursuing their long way south.

Yet if I looked forward with a consuming eagerness to those days, then Mutt's anticipation far
surpassed mine. Having found a purpose in his life, he became so avid for the hunt that in the final weeks before the season opened he would become impervious to all ordinary temptations. Cats could wander at will across his own lawn, not a dozen feet from his twitching nose, and he would not even see them. The honeyed breeze from the house next door, where a lovely little cocker bitch yearned in lonely isolation, had no power to wake him from his dreams. He lay on the browning lawn beside the garage and did not take his eyes from the doors through which Eardlie would soon emerge to carry him, and us, into the living plains.

Each season he went absolutely mad on the first day, and each season when he retrieved his first bird, he brought back a badly mangled corpse. But that never happened twice in a given year. And after that first outburst he would steady to his job.

There seemed to be no limits to his capacity for self-improvement as a hunting dog. Each season he devised new refinements designed to bring him nearer to perfection; and some of these were more than passing strange.

One Wednesday in early October we introduced a friend from Ontario to prairie hunting. He owned a whole kennel of purebred setters, and he
had hunted upland birds in the east for thirty years. He was a man who could seldom be surprised by the sagacity of dogs. Yet Mutt surprised and even startled him.

Although he was clearly taken aback by Mutt's appearance, our friend refrained from casting any doubts upon the glowing character which we gave our dog, and as a result of this act of faith he and Mutt got on well from the outset of their acquaintance. On the Wednesday of which I write, the two of them went off together around one side of a large poplar bluff, while Father and I went around the other side. Our mutual objective was a covey of Hungarian partridges which we knew to be lurking somewhere near at hand.

Now Hungarian partridges have survived and multiplied even where the hunting pressure is severest and there is good reason why this is so. Once the fusillade of opening day has alerted them, they become, for the most part, quite untouchable. Crouched invisible in the stubble, they see you long before you see them, and when you have closed to within forty or fifty yards, they burst upward like so many land mines; the flock disperses in as many directions as there are birds, and at bulletlike speed. They hit the ground running, and never stop
running until they are miles away. And they seem to run just a little faster than they fly.

Our eastern friend knew all of this, in theory anyway. He was properly alert when the flock flushed at fifty yards to vanish almost immediately into a willow swale. Nevertheless, he did not even have time to pull a trigger. He was chagrined by this failure. And then to make matters worse Mutt suddenly disobeyed the cardinal bird-dog law, and without so much as an apologetic look at his companion, he raced after the vanished flock.

Our friend whistled, called him, swore at him, but to no avail. Mutt galloped away in his quaint and lopsided fashion and soon was out of sight.

We rejoined our guest at the far side of the poplar bluff, and though he had the grace to say nothing, it was easy enough to guess his thoughts. But it was not so easy to guess them when, a few minutes later, there was a great huffing and puffing from behind us and we turned to see Mutt approaching at a trot, and bearing a partridge in his mouth.

Our friend was frankly overcome.

“What the devil!” he cried. “I never fired my gun. Don't tell me this paragon of yours doesn't even need a gunner's help?”

Father laughed in a condescending sort of way.

“Oh, not quite that,” he explained with his usual flair for the dramatic. “Mutt gets more birds, of course, if he has a gun to help him – but he does pretty well without. He runs them down, you know.”

Father did not bother to complete the explanation, and our friend returned to the distant east somewhat dissatisfied with his fine kennel stock, and only after a determined but useless attempt to take Mutt with him. He was a man who believed his eyes, and he did not know, as we did, that the unshot Hungarian had been a running cripple, probably wounded by another hunter sometime earlier.

Nevertheless, Mutt's abilities in this regard were not to be treated lightly. He often spotted a cripple in a flock when we could not, and on at least a dozen different occasions he made a retrieve when we, who had not fired, were morally certain there was nothing to retrieve. We learned not to waste adrenaline cursing at him when he abandoned normal procedure and went off on his own. It was too embarrassing, apologizing to him when he returned later with a bird in his mouth.

There was no place where a wounded bird was safe from him. His strangely bulbous nose, uncouth as it appeared, was singularly efficient in
the field and he could find birds that were apparently unfindable.

There were numbers of ruffed grouse in the poplar bluffs to the north of Saskatoon and occasionally we hunted these wily birds. They clung close to cover and were hard to hit. But once hit, they were always ours, for Mutt could find them though they hid in the most unlikely places.

One frosty morning near Wakaw Lake I slightly wounded a grouse and watched with disappointment as it flew across a wide intervening morass, and disappeared into the maze of upper branches of a diamond-willow clump. Mutt galloped off at once, but I was certain he would find no trace of it. Without hope I set out to follow him across the muskeg, and I was only nicely started on my way when I saw a considerable disturbance in the diamond-willow clump. The heavy growth – some twenty feet in height – began to sway and crackle. I stopped and stared, and in due time I saw a flash of white, and then beheld Mutt's head above the crown of the tree, with the ruffed grouse in his mouth – as usual.

He had some difficulty getting back to the ground, and he was rather disheveled when he finally reached me. But he accepted my congratulations
calmly. He took such things as this high-level retrieve quite for granted.

Even the open sky offered no sure sanctuary from him, for I have seen him leap six or eight feet in the air to haul down a slow-starting and slightly wounded prairie chicken or Hungarian. As for the water – the wounded duck that thought water offered safety was mortally in ignorance.

Mutt never became resigned to the oily taste of ducks, and he always brought them in by holding the tip of their wing feathers between his front teeth – with his lips curled back, as if the duck stank of some abominable odor. As a result of his distaste for them he could never bring himself to kill a duck, and this reluctance sometimes caused him trouble.

There was a time at Meota Lake when my father and I had been lucky enough to knock down five mallards with four shots. Unfortunately, the birds were all alive, and actively so, although they could not fly. Mutt went after them, but it was a very swampy shore, and it was all he could do to wade through the marsh unimpeded. It was almost impossible for him to return to firm ground with a flapping mallard in his mouth. He solved the problem by carrying his retrieves to a tiny islet in the lake, while we went off to find a boat.

When we reached the islet, a half hour later, we found a fantastic situation. There was Mutt, and there were the five ducks, but all of them were on the move. One, two, or three at a time, the ducks would waddle off toward the water, and Mutt would dash between them and freedom and herd them back to the high ground. Then he would snatch at the wing of one, sit – literally – on another, hold two down with his paws, and try to maneuver his belly over the fifth. But the fifth would manage to get free, and scuttle away. Whereupon Mutt would have to abandon all his prisoners; they would all dash off, and he would have it all to do over again. He was about at the end of his tether when we came to his rescue, and it was the only time on a hunting trip that I ever saw him really harassed. How he managed to get those five struggling birds to the island in the first place I do not know.

He had long since perfected his diving technique, and could attain depths of five feet and stay under for as long as a minute. He soon learned, too, that in the case of a deep-diving duck it was sometimes possible to tire it out by waiting on the surface at the point where it would most probably rise, and then forcing it under again before it had time to breathe.

Only once did I see him beaten by a duck – and that time it was no real duck, but a western grebe. Mutt had already retrieved a bufflehead for us, and had gone back out in the belief that a second bird awaited his attention. We could not persuade him otherwise. Knowing how useless it was to argue with him, we let him have his way, although the grebe was quite uninjured – at least by any shot of ours.

Grebes seldom fly, but they dive like fish, and Mutt spent the best part of an hour chasing that bird while Father and I concealed ourselves in the duck blind, and tried to muffle our mirth. It would never have done to let Mutt know we were amused. He did not appreciate humor when he was its butt.

He got more and more exasperated and, though the water was ten or fifteen feet deep, he finally gave up trying to tire the grebe and decided to go down after it. But he was not built for really deep diving. His buoyancy was too great, and he was badly ballasted. At the third attempt he turned-turtle under the water and popped to the surface upside down. Then and only then did he reluctantly come ashore. We set off at once to hunt grouse so that he could get the taste of defeat out
of his mouth, and otherwise relieve himself of about a gallon of lake water.

Word of Mutt's phenomenal abilities soon got around, for neither my father nor I was reticent about him. At first the local hunters were skeptical, but after some of them had seen him work, their disbelief began to change into a strong civic pride that, in due time, made Mutt's name a byword for excellence in Saskatchewan hunting circles.

Indeed, Mutt became something of a symbol – a truly western symbol, for his feats were sometimes slightly exaggerated by his partisans for the benefit of unwary strangers – particularly if the strangers came out of the east. It was an encounter between just such a stranger and some of Mutt's native admirers that brought him to his greatest and most lasting triumph – a success that will not be forgotten in Saskatoon while there are birds, and dogs to hunt them.

It all began on one of those blistering July days when the prairie pants like a dying coyote, the dust lies heavy, and the air burns the flesh it touches. On such days those with good sense retire to the cellar caverns that are euphemistically known in Canada as beer parlors. These are all much the same across the country – ill-lit and crowded dens,
redolent with the stench of sweat, spilled beer, and smoke – but they are, for the most part, moderately cool. And the insipid stuff that passes for beer is usually ice cold.

On this particular day five residents of the city, dog fanciers all, had forgathered in a beer parlor. They had just returned from witnessing some hunting-dog trials held in Manitoba, and they had brought a guest with them. He was a rather portly gentleman from the state of New York, and he had both wealth and ambition. He used his wealth lavishly to further his ambition, which was to raise and own the finest retrievers on the continent, if not in the world. Having watched his own dogs win the Manitoba trials, this man had come on to Saskatoon at the earnest invitation of the local men, in order to see what kind of dogs they bred, and to buy some if he fancied them.

He had not fancied them. Perhaps rightfully annoyed at having made the trip in the broiling summer weather to no good purpose, he had become a little overbearing in his manner. His comments when he viewed the local kennel dogs had been acidulous, and scornful. He had ruffled the local breeders' feelings, and as a result they were in a mood to do and say foolish things.

The visitor's train was due to leave at 4
P.M.
, and from 12:30 until 3 the six men sat cooling themselves internally, and talking dogs. The talk was as heated as the weather. Inevitably Mutt's name was mentioned, and he was referred to as an outstanding example of that rare breed, the Prince Albert retriever.

The stranger hooted. “Rare breed!” he cried. “I'll say it must be rare! I've never even heard of it.”