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The Floating Press - Payson Terhune Albert

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138 pages

English

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Dog lovers, rejoice. Buff: A Collie is another of Albert Payson Terhune's beloved volumes of stories about dogs. They run the gamut from silly to heartwarming, and everything in between. Endlessly entertaining, the stories also offer keen insight into why these fuzzy fellows have earned the honor of being man's best friend. You'll come back to this charming collection of canine antics again and again.

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Children's

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 février 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776532377
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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BUFF: A COLLIE
AND OTHER DOG-STORIES
* * *
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

*
Buff: A Collie And Other Dog-Stories First published in 1921 Epub ISBN 978-1-77653-237-7 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77653-238-4 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
*
Foreword Buff: A Collie I - The Fighting Strain II - "The Hunt is Up!" III - Masterless! IV - The End of the Trail "Something" Chums Human-Interest Stuff "One Minute Longer" The Foul Fancier The Grudge The Sunnybank Collies
Foreword
*
A swirl of gold-and-white and gray and black,— Rackety, vibrant, glad with life's hot zest,— Sunnybank collies, gaily surging pack,— These are my chums; the chums that love me best.
Not chums alone, but courtiers, zealots, too,— Clean-white of soul, too wise for fraud or sham; Yet senseless in their worship ever new. These are the friendly folk whose god I am.
A blatant, foolish, stumbling, purblind god,— A pinchbeck idol, clogged with feet of clay! Yet, eager at my lightest word or nod, They crave but leave to follow and obey.
We humans are so slow to understand! Swift in our wrath, deaf to the justice-plea, Meting out punishment with lavish hand! What, but a dog, would serve such gods as we?
Heaven gave them souls, I'm sure; but dulled the brain, Lest they should sadden at so brief a span Of heedless, honest life as they sustain; Or doubt the godhead of their master, Man.
Today a pup; to-morrow at life's prime; Then old and fragile;—dead at fourteen years. At best a meagre little inch of time. Oblivion then, sans mourners, memories, tears!
Service that asks no price; forgiveness free For injury or for injustice hard. Stanch friendship, wanting neither thanks nor fee Save privilege to worship and to guard:—
That is their creed. They know no shrewder way To travel through their hour of lifetime here. Would Man but deign to serve his God as they, Millennium must dawn within the year.
Buff: A Collie
*
I - The Fighting Strain
*
She was a mixture of the unmixable. Not one expert in eighty couldhave guessed at her breed or breeds.
Her coat was like a chow's, except that it was black and white andtan—as is no chow's between here and the Chinese Wall. Her deep chestwas as wide as a bulldog's; her queer little eyes slanted like acollie's; her foreface was like a Great Dane's, with its barrel muzzleand dewlaps. She was as big as a mastiff.
She was Nina, and she belonged to a well-to-do farmer named Shawe, aman who went in for registered cattle, and, as a side line, for prizecollies.
To clear up, in a handful of words, the mystery of Nina's breeding,her dam was Shawe's long-pedigreed and registered and prize-winningtricolour collie, Shawemere Queen. Her sire was Upstreet Butcherboy,the fiercest and gamest and strongest and most murderous pit-terrierever loosed upon a doomed opponent.
Shawe had decided not to breed Shawemere Queen that season. ShawemereQueen had decided differently. Wherefore, she had broken from herenclosure by the simple method of gnawing for three hours at therotting wood that held a rusty lock-staple.
This had chanced to befall on a night when Tug McManus had deputed theevening exercising of Upstreet Butcherboy to a new handy-man. Thehandy-man did not know Butcherboy's odd trick of going slack on thechain for a moment and then flinging himself forward with all hissurpassing speed and still more surpassing strength.
As a result, the man came back to McManus's alone, noisily nursingthree chain-torn fingers. Butcherboy trotted home to his kennel atdawn, stolidly taking the whaling which McManus saw fit to administer.
When Shawemere Queen's six bullet-headed pups came into the world,sixty-three days later, there was loud and lurid blasphemy, at hermaster's kennels. Shawe, as soon as he could speak with any degree ofcoherence, bade his kennelman drown five of the pups at once, and togive like treatment to the sixth as soon as its mother should have nofurther need of the youngster.
At random the kennelman scooped up five-sixths of the litter andstrolled off to the horse-pond.
As a result of this monopoly the sixth puppy throve apace. When shewas eight weeks old, fate intervened once more to save her from thehorse-pond. Mrs. Shawe's sister had come, with her two children, tospend the summer at the farm. The children, after a glimpse of thepure-breed collie litters gambolling in the shaded puppy-run, hadclamoured loudly for a pup of their own to play with.
Shawe knew the ways of a child with a puppy. He was of no mind to riskchorea or rickets or fits or other ailments, for any of his pricelesscollie babies; from such Teddy Bear handling as the two youngsterswould probably give it. Yet the clamour of the pair grew the moreplangently insistent.
Then it was that the bothered man bethought him of the illegitimateoffspring of Shawemere Queen, the nondescript pup he had planned todrown within the next few days. The problem was solved.
Once more, peace reigned at Shawemere. And the two children weredeliriously happy in the possession of a shaggy and shapeless morselof puppyhood, in whose veins coursed the ancient royal blood of purecolliedom and the riotously battling strain of the pit-warriors.
They named their pet "Nina," after a Pomeranian they had mauled andharassed into convulsions. And they prepared to give like treatmentto their present puppy.
But a cross-breed is ever prone to be super-sturdy. The roughlyaffectionate manhandling which had torn the Pom's hair-trigger nervesand tenuous vitality to shreds had no effect at all upon Nina. On thecontrary, she waxed fat under the dual caresses and yankings of hernew owners.
Which was lucky. For, while a puppy is an ideal playmate for a child,the average child is a horrible playmate for a puppy. With noconsciousness of cruelty, children maul or neglect or otherwiseill-treat thousands of friendly and helpless puppies to death, everyyear. And fond parents look on, with fatuous smiles, at their playfuloffsprings' barbarity.
Strong and vigorous from birth, Nina began to take on size at anamazing rate. Before she was eight months old she stood higher at theshoulder than any collie at Shawemere. She looked like no other dog onearth, and she was larger by far than either of her parents.
The cleverest breeder cannot always breed his best stock true to type.And when it comes to crossbreeding—especially with dogs—nothingshort of Mother Nature herself can predict the outcome.
Nina was a freak. She resembled outwardly neither collie nor pitbull-terrier. Withal, she was not ill to look on. There was a compactsymmetry and an impression of latent power to her. And the nondescriptcoat was thick and fine. In spite of all this, she probably would havemet with a swift and reasonably merciful death, on the departure ofthe two children, that autumn, had not Shawe realised that theyoungsters had been invited to the farm for the following summer, andthat the presence of their adored Nina would save some thoroughbredpup from sacrifice as a pet.
So the crossbreed was permitted to stay on, living at Shawemere onsufferance, well enough fed and housed in the stables, permitted towander pretty much at will, but unpetted and unnoticed. The folk atthe farm believed in breeding true to form. A nondescript did notinterest them.
And the loss was theirs. For the gigantic young mongrel was worthcultivating. Clever, lovable, obedient, brave, she was an ideal farmdog. And wistfully she sought to win friends from among theseindifferent humans. Sadly she missed the petting and the mauling ofthe children.
These so-called mongrels, by the way, are prone to be cleverer andstronger than any thoroughbred. Rightly trained, they are ideal chumsand pets and guards—a truth too little known.
If the farm people had troubled to give Nina one-fiftieth of theattention they lavished on the kennel dogs, they would have seen to itthat she did not set forth, one icy moonlight night in late November,on a restless gallop over the hills beyond the farm. And this storywould not have been written.
Champion Shawemere King was one of the four greatest collies inAmerica—perhaps on earth. He was such a dog as is bred perhaps twicein a generation—flawless in show qualities and in beauty and inmind. He had annexed the needful "fifteen points" for his championshipat the first six shows to which Shawe had taken him. Everywhere, hehad swept his way to "Winners" with ridiculous ease. He was thesensation of every show he went to.
Wisely, Shawe had withdrawn him from the ring while King was still inhis glory. And, a few years later, the champion had been takenpermanently from the kennels and had been promoted (or retired) to therank of chief house-dog. As perfect in the home as in the ring, he wasthe pride and ornament of the big farmhouse.
On this particular November night of ice and moonlight, King hadturned his back on the warmth of the living-room fire and thedisreputable old fur rug that was his resting-place, and hadstretched himself upon the veranda mat, head between forepaws; hisdeep-set dark eyes fixed on the highroad leading from town. Shawe hadgone to town for the evening. He had forbidden King to go with him.But, collie-like, the champion had preferred waiting on the cold porchfor a first glimpse of his returning master, rather than to lie insmug comfort indoors.
As he lay there he lifted his head suddenly from between his whiteforepaws and sniffe