Born to Bark Read online

  The voice that still had faint traces of the Cowardly Lion answered, “I believe that it was Lord Byron who observed, ‘All tragedies end in death, and all comedies end in marriage!’”

  “Since when have you become a philosopher?” I asked. “Anyway, do you think Joannie and I should make our relationship respectable and get married?”

  Once more that silly voice responded, this time giving the opinion “Seems like a good excuse for a party—as long as I don’t have to be respectable, too!”

  A few days later I asked Joan if she would like to marry me. She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me as her eyes filled with tears. “I never thought that you would ask me,” she said. “I would love to marry you, but there is one condition: I don’t want Flint to be part of the ceremony in any way!”

  “Oh,” I said, “you must have seen the note from the theological seminary that I had enrolled him in. I was planning on having him read us our vows!”

  Her pretty eyes twinkled and she hugged me again. “If he is not already ordained as a minister, then he is not any part of the ceremony!”

  The following August we were married. Joan made her own wedding dress and looked lovely. Our far-flung families converged on the city, and a group of our friends gathered for the event. Peter arranged for a bagpiper to play as Joan and I entered the hall. I did momentarily wonder to myself how Flint would have reacted to the sound of bagpipes, but after that we just had a good and fun party.

  I actually made two promises to Joan when I asked her to marry me. In addition to agreeing that Flint would not be part of our marriage ceremony, I promised her that as soon as I could pay off the mortgage on my little house in the city I would find her a tiny bit of farmland within easy driving distance. Coming from the prairies, she wanted her own bit of land with a garden where she could plant flowers and grow vegetables. If things went well, she also hoped someday to have a house large enough so that we could have visitors stay over—particularly her children and the grandchildren she was longing for.

  Less than a year later, Joan’s brother-in-law, Cameron, managed to find a small piece of farmland that he thought might work for us. A bit more than an hour’s drive away from the city, the 5 acres were being offered at a very low price because the property had been on the market for a long time in an area that was not very prosperous then. The owners wanted to get rid of it and accepted the low bid that I could afford. In addition to the land, there was a small shack of a house heated only by a woodstove in the main room, although electricity and indoor plumbing made it livable. There was also a structure that was supposed to be a barn—an empty shell of a building that was propped up on the east side while the wind kept it up on the west side. Joannie was ecstatic and set about clearing overgrown sections and planting her flowers and vegetables and trying to save some fruit trees that were already growing there.

  We spent most of our weekends and a good chunk of the summer out on the farm. I set up a little office space and began to work on my next book, for which the quiet of the farm was conducive. In between bouts of writing, I would take Flint out into the field and work on obedience exercises with him. Come the fall there would be a lot of pressure from members of the club for me to put him into competition. Joan seldom came into the house during daylight hours unless the weather was too inclement to garden. The little shack was rather ramshackle, and bits and pieces occasionally seemed spontaneously to self-destruct, but Joan soon had constructed a trellis with beautiful roses over the door. The windows of the house were too warped to open and close easily (or sometimes at all), but when you looked out of any one of them you would see the pleasant array of flowers and shrubs that she had planted and nurtured.

  Out at the farm Flint showed his prowess as a hunter. As with most farms, lots of vermin were around: rats, mice, moles, rabbits, opossums, skunks, and raccoons. All seemed intent on doing some form of damage. Some raided Joan’s little vegetable patch, some chewed on the trees, tore at the siding on the walls, tore holes in the roof, or worked their way into the house and cupboards and ate their way into boxes of crackers and other foodstuffs. It was a real problem trying to keep things safe from these pests.

  Soon after moving in, however, we began to find dead rats and mice in corners of the house or near Joan’s garden. At first Joan was upset because she thought that I must have set out poison, but I assured her that I would never do that because it could hurt Flint. Then one afternoon, as I stopped work and stepped outside with Flint to look for Joan, an opossum dashed across the grass, heading for a nearby tree with a carrot from Joan’s garden in his mouth. Flint, who had been walking beside me, immediately streaked forward, grabbed the opossum by the neck, and swung the animal in a violent snapping motion. The result was instantaneous death for the vegetable thief.

  Once again the marvels of genetics brought me to a halt. Suddenly the source of the dead rodents that we had been finding became clear. My dog—who had lived in the city all his life and had never been exposed to the situations for which terriers had originally been bred—followed his instincts the moment he was in the appropriate environment. Flint had become a formidable vermin hunter. I marveled at the dead opossum, which has more teeth than any other land mammal and can be ferocious when cornered—they don’t always play possum. Compared to my little dog, it certainly looked large and dangerous.

  Flint was happily prancing around and his proud voice boasted, “Call me Bwana, the great hunter! I am stalker and killer of all things with fur that enter my domain.” Then he simply left the site of his adventure, not even looking back at the body of his victim.

  When I told Joan about it, she smiled and replied, “Well, if that is true, then perhaps he’s not completely useless.” She then got a faraway look in her eyes and continued, “I wonder how he would be in the city.”

  We had a recurring problem with mice in our little old house in town. Due either to its age or to the fact that it had been put together quickly from a mail order catalog, it was never quite as well sealed as it should be, especially around the basement. Every year, as the autumn rains began to fall and the weather started to turn cold, mice got inside. They started in the basement, eventually reaching the kitchen where they would chew at food containers and leave their droppings. Mice had also damaged some of Joan’s favorite books and torn holes in some bolts of cloth that she’d stored in our basement. It was an unpleasant situation, but neither of us was comfortable using poison, and traps were inefficient, so it had seemed that we had to put up with them.

  When we returned to the city, Flint had the opportunity to shine. Joannie began to leave the basement door ajar and some of the floor-level cupboard doors open to allow him to find and catch the mice. Flint was great. He hunted rodents the way that terriers were bred to do and with a degree of patience and dedication that would make cat owners envious. He was a fabulous biological mousetrap.

  Joan was quite pleased with Flint’s proficiency. Typically, when he would kill a mouse he would leave it on the floor where it fell just as he had done for the larger vermin out at the farm. Joan gladly disposed of the small carcasses and would gratefully praise Flint for his efforts, giving him a friendly pat and sometimes even a treat. She seemed to be warming toward my little dog, and I had high hopes that the cold war between them had ended.

  Perhaps Flint saw this as his opportunity to make amends with Joan, that other human that he lived with, or perhaps he just reverted to being a terrier with a sense of humor. In any event, one morning Flint decided to make a peace offering to Joan. It was quite early, and Joan had awakened in bed to the gentle pressure of Flint’s front paws resting on her. She looked down at him only to find that he had deposited on her chest a mouse—still warm but quite dead. I fear that the gift was not accepted in the tender and accommodating spirit with which it was offered. She jumped up with a startled shriek and Flint began to dance around happily. He knew that he had done something truly great and grand, since it was causing such a c
ommotion on her side of the bed and such convulsive laughter on mine.

  One morning Flint decided to make a peace offering to Joan.

  Joannie was upset. “You put him up to this, didn’t you?”

  I protested, “Of course not. Flint was just trying to please you, not insult you.” But Joan glanced back and forth suspiciously between us. Even as I tried to regain my composure and look innocent and reassuring to my wife, I could hear Flint’s voice in my head, “My motto is, if two wrongs don’t make a right, then try three!”

  For the next several days, Joan would wake up in the mornings and automatically sweep her hand down over the covers to make sure that Flint had not deposited any more “gifts” for her.

  Although Flint’s hunting instincts were useful, there was one instance in which his behavior could have gone wrong. I had taken Flint to work with me, as I often did, and since I had nothing scheduled for the next hour or so and it was close to lunchtime, I decided to take him for a short walk around the campus.

  The university was in an expansion phase, with new buildings being erected and new wings added to existing buildings. Older structures were being torn down, most of them “temporary” wooden buildings that had been built as barracks and office spaces for the military personnel stationed on campus during World War II. When the war ended and many returning soldiers accepted the government’s offer to pay for their university education, there had been no space in the existing buildings for the sudden surge of returning veterans who were becoming students. As a result those temporary buildings were adapted for use as classrooms, offices, and labs. After a while these old, weathered wooden structures simply came to be accepted as normal campus facilities. Some new departments had been born and housed in these old structures for all the years that they had been functioning.

  Several wooden barracks were located behind the education building and now, some 40 years after the war’s end, were finally being demolished to allow the construction of a new wing. The wooden edifices disappeared one at a time. Each one would be knocked down, the debris cleared, and then the next one razed. This orderly work pattern made activity predictable, and on sunny days education students would sit outside their building and watch the demolition of these old structures while eating lunch or sipping coffee. Flint and I wandered in the direction of the building scheduled to be pulled down that afternoon.

  Two large bulldozers were parked next to the doomed building. I’d taken Flint to this area to allow him some sport with the large population of mice, rats, rabbits, and squirrels. The university sits out on a peninsula and is completely surrounded by woods that continue down to the shoreline. A lot of wildlife call this area home. Three main groups of predators hunt the small animals. The largest group is the predatory birds: hawks, owls, and eagles. There are also a small number of coyotes, which are seldom seen except after sundown when much of the human population has gone home. There are a number of cats, too, both domestic (which are allowed to roam by owners living in nearby campus residences) and feral (which live and breed in hidden spaces, under older structures, or anywhere else that they can find). Like the coyotes, feral cats are seldom seen unless they are out hunting. We could now add to these groups one gray Cairn terrier who got to explore the terrain at the end of a 25-foot extendable leash.

  Flint loved to sniff around as we walked. He seldom managed to catch anything on campus, although he occasionally flushed out a rabbit or rat, or got to dash madly after a squirrel. At least once, he did startle a large rat from cover. It made a wrong turn in its attempt to escape and Flint caught and dispatched it in his efficient terrier style. Mostly, however, he simply got to chase his prey out to the end of the long leash, at which point he could not actually make contact with his target. Nonetheless, just finding and pursuing vermin seemed to give him pleasure. Near the empty building, a cluster of students was standing or sitting, ready to watch the initial phase when the walls and roof would be brought down—the most exciting part. As we got closer to the structure, Flint got excited. These old buildings had been intended to be used only for a short time, so they had only minimal foundations and no basements, with the floors raised 2 or 3 feet off the ground. An open lattice of wood slats had once surrounded the crawl space, but over the years pieces of lathe had broken or rotted out leaving large holes that allowed access to the area under the floor. I assumed that Flint must have caught the scent of some rodent hiding in the crawl space and wanted to go after it.

  The situation seemed safe, so I moved near one of the larger holes in the understructure and let him run ahead on the lead. He raced inside with a happy bark. Some of the students wandered closer to see what I was doing.

  “He’s a terrier,” I explained. “He thinks that there is something in there to hunt. Maybe he’ll catch a mouse or rat. I have him on this long leash so that he won’t get lost under there.”

  “Really?” asked one of a knot of young coeds standing off to the side, and she bent down to try to look through the hole that Flint had disappeared into.

  I could feel an occasional tug, so I knew that Flint was near the end of the line. Then there was a quick slackening and tightening causing several jerks. He’s actually caught something, I thought. I assumed that the tugs on the leash were from Flint grabbing some rodent and giving it the shake of death. Shortly I would know for sure, since Flint was bound to come out and present me with his prize.

  The leash went slack and a few moments later Flint emerged from the shadowy subfloor area. Sure enough, he was carrying a gray furry object, which hung limply from his mouth. He was carrying it by the scruff of its neck, its tail dragging on the ground. When the sunshine hit him, I saw to my horror that he was carrying the body of a young kitten that couldn’t have been more than about 6 weeks old.

  My heart sank. One of the feral cats must have chosen to have her litter under this building. But unfortunately, my hunter-killer terrier had discovered them, and now in a moment or two, when we would be standing surrounded by dozens of student witnesses, my dog would prove to the world that he was a murderer of helpless, cute little kittens. There was a gasp from the group surrounding us when they realized what my dog was carrying.

  Flint dropped the limp carcass and gave a bark that seemed a request for praise for his hunting skill. As I bent over the kitten’s body, it suddenly twitched and rolled to its feet. Blinking at the bright sunshine, the kitten scanned the people surrounding it, then looked down and, seeing the dust and dirt that had accumulated on her fur from Flint dragging it around, began to clean itself. The assembled students oohed and ahhed.

  When I looked up to see what Flint was doing, he was gone. The leash disappeared through the hole, so he was back under the building. A few moments later he emerged again, carrying an orange-and-white striped kitten that he dropped next to its littermate, also alive and unharmed.

  I barely caught a glimpse of Flint’s carrot-shaped tail, which was quivering with excitement, before he ducked yet a third time back into the gloom. Two or three minutes later he reemerged with a black-and-white kitten that was squirming a bit, as if annoyed by the indignity of being rescued by a dog. Once Flint deposited it next to its brother and sister, it began to make little mewling sounds. Flint then circled the group, as if to assure himself that all were present, but made no move to go back under the building.

  Kneeling next to this collection of felines, I wondered, “What do I do next?”

  I took a chance, and announced, “Well, gang, it looks like my dog has saved the lives of these three little guys. In an hour the bulldozers would have brought this whole building down on them. Now we have a problem. These kittens are going to need a home or I’ll have to take them to a shelter.”

  I had barely stopped for a breath when one young woman with a Shirley Temple mop of blond hair rushed forward and asked, “You mean that we can take them?”

  “I don’t believe that they belong to anyone, and they certainly can’t survive on their own. So if you w
ant one of these kittens, feel free to take it home with you.”

  The girl bent over the trio of kittens and lifted the black-and-white one up to her face. It stretched its paws out and touched her nose. “I’m going to call you Patches,” she announced, and then tucked the little animal into the crook of her arm and disappeared into the crowd.

  A moment later another girl in a faded denim jacket picked up the little gray cat. “Hello, Shadow,” she said to the cat, as she carried it away. “That’s your new name.”

  A slim Chinese girl lowered herself to her knees next to the remaining orange-and-white kitten, which immediately got up and approached her. “May I have him?” she asked in a soft, tentative voice.

  I nodded and she looked back at the kitten, gazed into its eyes, and said gently, “I will call you Lao Hu, which means ‘tiger’ in Chinese, if that is acceptable to you.” The little cat rubbed against her outstretched hand as if to say that he was happy with his new name. She carefully lifted the kitten and hugged it to her chest. She looked at me and smiled, and said, “Thank you.” Then she turned and looked at Flint and said in a quiet and respectful voice, “And thank you. If you were mine I would call you Hui Shih, which means ‘gray lion,’ because you are brave and noble and benevolent like the Celestial Lion.”

  Two Chinese girls who had been standing close to her overheard this and both shouted “Yes” and clapped their hands. The girl on her knees clutched the kitten tightly, gave a little bow with her head, then rose and joined the other two girls. The small group disappeared as they passed through the crowd of spectators.

  About a half hour later the engine of a yellow-and-black bulldozer started. A few minutes after, the whole side of the building next to the place where Flint had emerged with the kittens collapsed. I looked at my little dog and marveled. Even though he was genetically programmed to hunt and kill small furry things, today he had gently retrieved three young cats and presented them to me as if he intended for me to take care of them. I looked at the growing pile of rubble that was once a building and observed, “You saved three lives today, my puppy. You are a hero!”