Toddling around in our big front yard one summer day, I heard whimpering sounds coming from the vicinity of the lilac hedge.
I stopped to listen. This was definitely something new.
I started walking along the lilac hedge, parting the leaves as I went.
Suddenly a white leghorn hen flew out in a flurry of leaves and feathers, startling me. I peered into the place where she had exited.
Ten white eggs lay in the shadows of a secret nest she had made at the base of the branches.
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But I could still hear strange little sounds.
Parting the branches a little further along the hedge, I found myself looking into the uneasy eyes of our black dog and crawling about her were four new pups.
The mother dog wagged her tail hesitantly, as if imploring me not to touch her new babies.
She needn’t have worried.
I was off as fast as my short, fat legs would go to tell Mom of my discovery.
For some reason she didn’t seem nearly as surprised as I thought she would.
“You leave the dog and her pups alone for a few days, OK? She needs some rest.”
I could hardly wait for permission to go back to the lilac hedge and pick out one of those pups. I chose a roly-poly brown one we dubbed Tubby.
Approaching the house, I put the squirming little pup down beside me as I climbed the first steep step on my hands and knees. When I turned around to pick up the puppy, he was gone.
The mother dog had carried him back to his home in the lilac hedge.
As determined as I was to bring that puppy into the house, it took many more repeats of playing “snatch and grab” before the mother dog finally gave up. Or maybe I just managed to hold onto the puppy and climb those steep steps at the same time.
Tubby and I became inseparable. When Mom found a mysterious wee puddle on the floor, she never knew which one to blame.
Banished to the big front yard for our periodic indiscretions, we roamed about at will, nosing into all the things a little girl and her puppy might find.
Tubby grew into a stocky brown and tan Collie with a stump of a tail that wagged in delight when I came home from school each day.
He prided himself on being the farm watchdog but he had a heart too big and friendly to exclude anyone, strangers and thieves included.
As for herding cattle, his instincts were so suppressed as to be barely distinguishable except for those rare and unusual moments when he would nip at a wayward cow’s heel in obedience to our prolonged coaxing.
It seemed to create such feelings of guilt in his canine soul that he would slink along with his tail between his legs begging for our forgiveness.
Despite our reassurances that he had done what we expected, Tubby never could overcome the twinges of regret he suffered for inflicting even minimal pain upon a member of the bovine species. And so for him it was gratifying indeed the day the tables turned.
The pasture in which our lone cow grazed seemed an exceptionally long way to go one hot summer afternoon, and so I told Tubby to go fetch her home for milking.
He looked at me as if to say, “are you kidding?”
I pointed to the cow in the distance, blissfully chewing her cud. Tubby peered in her direction and then looked at me with doleful brown eyes.
“Fetch,” I commanded.
He hesitated.
“Do you want some raisins?” He wagged his stumpy tail.
“Then fetch the cow.”
If there was anything in the pantry that Tubby liked as a reward, it was raisins. He took off at full speed down the bush trail that separated the house from the pasture.
I sat down on the back step to wait. In the distance I could hear Tubby’s eager barking and the irregular chiming of the cowbell as the confrontation occurred. And then the sound settled into a steady rhythm as cow and dog started for home.
When they emerged from the bush trail, however, it wasn’t the dog chasing the cow home.
The cow was chasing the dog home. Galloping for all she was worth, Tubby was just managing to keep ahead of irate Bossie, whose horns were menacingly close to his rear end.
Tubby never even stopped at the barn. He just made a beeline to the house for his raisins.
As long as we kept that cow, she chased the dog home at milking time. To my way of thinking, a few raisins were well worth having one less chore to do.
