The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (7 page)

utt had always disliked cats, but until he became an expert fence walker, he had never been able to demonstrate his feelings in a truly efficient manner. The fenced-in back yards of Saskatoon might have been built to order for the cats, and specifically designed to thwart all dogs. Perhaps as a result of this favorable environment the cat population was large, and the cats themselves had grown careless and arrogant. It was understandable that they should feel this way, after many years of security; but it was a foolhardy attitude, as Mutt soon demonstrated.

Once he had perfected the art of fence walking, he became the scourge and often the nemesis of the cats on our block. When the surviving local cats
became few in number, and wary, Mutt went farther afield, scouring alleys right across Saskatoon for cats that had not had warning of his unique abilities. Before the year was out he had engendered such a feeling of insecurity among the city's cats that they had become almost wholly arboreal.

Once having located a cat, Mutt would make the usual futile sort of dog rush in its direction. The cat would promptly climb the nearest fence and sit there feeling at ease and safe. With a dejected look Mutt would turn away, apparently accepting defeat, while the cat spat insults at his retreating back.

But having reached a corner of the fence, Mutt would turn suddenly and with a great leap gain the top two-by-four. Before the startled cat had time to stand its hair on end, Mutt would come rushing toward it, on its own level.

The cat would now find itself at a double disadvantage. It could not safely balance on the fence while it attempted to scratch out its assailant's eyes. Neither could it safely turn its back and flee. If it leaped down to the ground, it was at once in Mutt's native element. If it attempted to retreat along the fence, Mutt's long legs would soon catch it up. Only if there was a tree within instant reach could the cat hope to escape unscathed.

It was inevitable – Mutt being the way he was – that he would one day decide to follow his quarry into the upper branches. Nor was it as improbable an endeavor as it may sound. After all, there are many other terrestrial animals that occasionally take to the trees, and do so with some skill. Goats are often to be seen, in Mediterranean countries, browsing the upper branches of olive trees. Ground hogs will also climb trees, and there are many reports of coyotes having been treed by pursuing hounds.

Nevertheless, my family and I were electrified one morning to discover Mutt halfway up a tree in our back yard. He was climbing awkwardly but determinedly, and he got fifteen feet above the ground before a dead branch gave beneath his weight and he came bouncing down again. He was slightly bruised, and the wind was knocked out of him; but he had proved that climbing was not impossible for a dog, and from that moment he never looked down.

None of us realized just how far he would dare with his new skill until a day in the spring of the following year when a fire engine went streaking past our house with sirens blasting. I leaped aboard my bike and gave chase. Half a block from home I
overtook a chum of mine named Abel Cullimore, also riding his bicycle, and I pulled up alongside to ask what the excitement was about.

Abel was a fat youth, and he was gasping for breath. “Don't know – for sure–” he panted. “I heard – wild animal – in a tree.”

By this time we had turned down Seventh Avenue and we could see a small cluster of people grouped about the fire engine, which had stopped under a row of cottonwood trees a block ahead of us. The engine was a ladder truck and the ladder was extended so that its top was lost to view amidst the bright greenery above. As we drew near, a newspaper photographer stepped out of a car with his camera in his hand.

Two grim-looking householders were standing on the sidewalk beneath the cottonwoods, cradling shotguns in their arms. I walked over to them and, peering upward, caught a glimpse of familiar black and white fur, and I knew at once to whom it must belong.

Alarmed by the attitude of the two gunners, I hastened to explain to them that the thing up the tree was only a dog –
my
dog in fact.

This information was greeted with hostility.

“Smart-aleck kid!” one of the men remarked.

The other waved me away, saying sternly, “Run along, you boy. If you wasn't so young, I'd say you was corked.”

The first man guffawed loudly, and I backed away. I could not really blame the men. The foliage was too thick for any stranger to identify the beast up in the tree, and anyway it was making a weird and most undoglike noise. Only Abel and I recognized the sounds as the plaintive chattering that Mutt made when he was in difficulties.

I was debating whether or not I dared accost the man who was operating the fire-truck controls when there came a startled cry from the branches overhead, into which a fireman armed with a gunny sack and a revolver had just disappeared.

“Son of a self-sealing cylinder,” he bawled, a note of intense incredulity in his voice, “it's a damn dawg!”

Mutt and I were both greatly relieved when the fireman finally descended with the “dawg” slung over his shoulder. Mutt had suffered no harm, other than to his dignity, but that had been ruffled, and he slunk away for home the moment the fireman put him down.

Descending from trees always remained a difficulty for Mutt and when he began climbing ladders
he encountered the same problem, and it got him into several curious situations.

His interest in ladders had followed naturally upon his tree-climbing experiments, and I encouraged him, for I was anxious to expand my renown as the owner of a remarkably acrobatic dog. We began with stepladders, and these were easy. Rung ladders followed, and before many days he could mount quickly and lightly to the roof of our house. But if the pitch of the ladder was at all steep, his attempts to descend, head first, degenerated into a free slide that ended with a thump on the ground below. Eventually he learned to control his descent by hooking his hind feet over progressively lower rungs, while he guided himself with his forefeet. But in the early stages of his ladder-climbing career he could only go up.

Not content to experiment with our ladders at home, Mutt would tackle any ladder he came across. It so happened that there lived on our street a man by the name of Couzinsky – a baker by trade, and on the night shift at his plant. It was Couzinsky's habit to spend the daylight hours improving the appearance of his two-story frame house. He used to repaint the entire house at least once a year, and each year he used a different color.

One would have thought that he enjoyed ladder work almost as much as Mutt, for on any suitable day you could find Couzinsky perched high up under the eaves wielding his brush. He once explained his passion for painting in this way: “Why I painted? Why, you ask? She's lovely street, this place. Better I should look lovely too! And so I painted!”

And so he did.

I was not always fortunate enough to witness Mutt's misadventures, but I witnessed this one. It was unforgettable. It was on a Saturday afternoon and Mutt and I had been for a tramp along the riverbank looking for dinosaur bones. On the way home we passed Couzinsky's place and I noted with approval that he was changing his color scheme again, this time from green to puce. As I walked on I did not notice that Mutt was no longer at my heels, for I was engrossed in speculation about the possibility of finding dinosaur bones in the Anglican Church yard. By this, I hasten to explain, I mean that it had dawned on me that the gravediggers might conceivably stumble across such remains when they were about their work. I knew one of the diggers slightly, and I had just about decided that I would try to enlist his interest when
there came a frightful shriek from somewhere behind me.

I spun on my heel and there, high on the south wall of Couzinsky's multicolored house, I saw a strange tableau.

At the very top of the ladder was Couzinsky himself. He was clinging by his hands to the eave trough, while from his right foot a gallon can of paint hung precariously suspended. Immediately below him was Mutt. Mutt's situation was most peculiar. He must have attempted to turn around on the upper rungs of the ladder, but he had only succeeded in thrusting his head and forequarters
through
the rungs so that he was balanced on his midriff and helpless to move in any direction. Couzinsky was still yelling fiercely, but Mutt was saving his breath.

I ran to their aid and, having clambered up the ladder, managed to get Mutt turned around. Couzinsky put his feet back on the top rung and we three descended to the ground.

As Mutt's nominal master I expected a severe dressing-down, but Couzinsky surprised me. Apparently his admiration for Mutt's climbing abilities outweighed the effects of the shock that he had suffered. It must have been a severe shock too.

“I stand there painted,” he explained to me, “and nowhere looking when it comes up between the legs. Dat dug! Oh my, dat dug! I yomp, what else?”

What else indeed. I only wonder that he did not yomp clear up onto the roof.

Mutt and I withdrew after I had made my apologies for both of us, and the outcome of the incident was that Couzinsky became our warmest friend in the neighborhood. He never tired of telling the story about “dat dug.”

On another occasion Mutt found a tempting ladder, ascended it, and, being unable to turn around, simply clambered into an open second-story bedroom window and scratched at the closed bedroom door until the householder came upstairs and let him out. The owner of that house was another singular character. He had worked for the Canadian National Railways for thirty-odd years and as a result he was the most phlegmatic man I ever knew. Nothing could disturb his equanimity.

When he re-entered his living room after having let Mutt out the back door, his wife asked him what the noise upstairs had been, and he replied, “Nothing, my dear. Only a stray dog in the bedroom.”

I know that this is true, for his wife told Mother
about it during a tea party, and Mother, recognizing that the culprit must have been Mutt, told me.

It was after he had at last become fully competent at going both ways on a ladder that his brush with the Cat Lady occurred.

I never heard her other name, if indeed she had one. To all of us on River Road, adults and children alike, she was known only as the Cat Lady. She lived in a ramshackle frame house at the corner of our block, and she kept cats.

There must be many women like her in the world; spinsters, most of them, who suffer from frustration and who take to cats in compensation. Women of this kind can be truly formidable in their felinity, and such a one was our Cat Lady. She knew no other love, no other interest than her cats, and when she began to have differences with her neighbors and with the public-health authorities about them, she resolutely turned her back on the outer world. No human being was allowed to enter her house and for some ten years before we arrived on River Road, not even the milkman – a favored character whom she tolerated – had been inside her doors. She refused even to allow the meter readers to enter the basement, and finally the utility company had to cut off the power and the water.

No one had any accurate idea of how many cats her house actually contained. It was one of the entertainments of my friends and me to spy on the place – but circumspectly, for she was a devil with her tongue and with her broom – and count the cats that we could see on the windowsills. One Saturday I counted forty-eight, but a chum of mine swore that he had once counted sixty-five.

Because of dogs and neighbors, the cats were not allowed out into the yard, and the lower windows of the place were never opened, winter or summer. The interior of that house must have had an atmosphere reminiscent of the lion house at a second-rate zoo, for when the wind was right and the Cat Lady's upstairs windows were open, I could detect the unmistakable feline odor all the way down the block to our house.

In order to give her cats some opportunity for exercise the Cat Lady made use of an oddity in the design of her house. The place was built on a T plan with the crossbar representing a normal peak-roofed section facing on River Road, and the upright of the T representing a two-story structure with an almost flat roof that sloped gently toward the rear and terminated in a fifteen-foot drop to the back garden. Two gable windows of the main
section of the house opened on to this flat-topped wing, and in fair weather these windows were opened and the cats could promenade over the roof to absorb fresh air and moonshine. They got no sunshine, for the Cat Lady allowed them no freedom in daylight, fearing perhaps that her neighbors would be able to make a sufficiently accurate count to force the public-health officials to take action.

I have no idea which one of us youths made the original suggestion. I was against it at first. It was only after much badinage, and many taunting reflections on my courage, and on Mutt's skill, that I consented.