V
A dog does not live as long as a man and this natural law is the fount of many tears. If boy and puppy might grow to manhood and doghood together, and together grow old, and so in due course die, full many a heartache might be avoided. But the world is not so ordered, and dogs will die and men will weep for them so long as there are dogs and men.
A setter may live a dozen years—may live fifteen. Job lived fourteen years. But the years of his prime were only seven, less than his share, for in his sixth year he had distemper and hunted not at all then or the year thereafter. For months through his long convalescence he was too weak to walk and Chet used to go in the morning and lift the dog from his bed in the barn into a wheelbarrow; and he would wheel Job around into the sun where he might lie quietly the long day through. But in his eighth year he was himself again—and in his ninth and tenth he hunted.
When he was eleven years old his eyes failed him. The eye is the first target of old age in a setter. It fails while the nose is still keen. In August of Job’s eleventh year he went into the fields with Chet one day when Chet was haying, and because the day was fine the dog was full of life, went at a gallop to and fro across the field.
Chet had begun to fear that Job was aging; he watched the dog now, somewhat reassured; and he said to Jim Saladine, who was helping him, “There’s life in the old dog yet.”
“Look at that!” said Saladine.
But Chet had seen. Job going full tilt across the field had run headlong into a bowlder as big as a barrel, which rose three feet above the stubble. He should have seen it clear across the field; he had not seen it at all. They heard his yelp of pain at the blow upon his tender nose and saw him get up and totter in aimless circles. Chet ran toward him, comforted him.
The dog was not stone blind, but his sight was almost gone. It must have gone suddenly, though Chet looking backward could see that he should have guessed before. Job was half stunned by the blow he had received and he followed Chet to the barn and lay down on a litter of hay there and seemed glad to rest. Chet, his eyes opened by what had happened, seemed to see the marks of age very plain upon the old dog of a sudden.
He took him into the covers that fall once or twice and Job’s nose functioned as marvelously as ever. But Chet could not bear to see the old dog blundering here and there, colliding with every obstacle that offered itself. After the third trial he gave up and hunted no more that fall. He even refused to go out with others when they brought their dogs.
“My old Job can’t hunt any more,” he would say. “I don’t seem to enjoy it any more myself. I guess I’ll not go out to-day.”
Hayes was one of those who tried to persuade Chet to take the field. An abiding friendship had grown up between these two. And late in October Hayes brought another puppy to the farm.
“He’ll never be the dog Job was,” he told Chet. “But he’s a well-blooded dog.”
“There won’t ever be another Job,” Chet agreed. “But—I’m obliged for the puppy—and he’ll be company for Job.”
He called the new dog Mac and he set about Mac’s training that winter, but his heart was not in it. That Job should grow old made Chet feel his own years heavy upon him. He was still in middle life, as hale as any man of twenty. But—Job was growing old and Chet’s heart was heavy.
Mary Thurman in the village—it was she whom Job called his mistress—saw the sorrow in Chet. She was full of sympathetic understanding of the man. They were as truly one as though they had been married these dozen years.
Annie Bissell, Will Bissell’s wife, said to her once: “Why don’t you marry him, Mary? Land knows, you’ve loved him long enough.”
Mary Thurman told her: “He don’t need me. He’s always lived alone and been comfortable enough and never known the need of a woman. I’ll marry no man that don’t know he needs me and tells me so.”
“Land knows, he needs someone to rid up that house of his. It’s a mess,” the other woman said.
“Chet don’t need me,” Mary insisted. “When he needs me I reckon I’ll go to him.”
She saw now the sorrow in Chet’s eyes and she tried to talk him out of it and to some extent succeeded.
Chet laughed a little, rubbed Job’s head, said slowly: “I hate to see the old dog get old, that’s all.”
“Sho,” said Mary, “he’s just beginning to enjoy living. Don’t have to work any more.”
In the end she did bring some measure of comfort to Chet. And it was she who christened Job anew. He and Chet came down one evening, stopped on their way for the mail, and she greeted Chet and to the dog said, “Hello, Old Tantrybogus.”
Chet looked at her, asked what she meant.
“Nothing,” Mary told him. “He just looks like an old tantrybogus, that’s all.”
“What is a tantrybogus?” Chet asked. “I don’t believe there’s any such thing.”
“Well, if there was he’d look like one,” said Mary.
The name took hold. Mary always used it; Chet himself took it up. By the time Job was twelve years old he was seldom called anything else.
Chet had expected that Mac, the young dog, would prove a companion for Job, but at first it seemed he would be disappointed. To begin with, Job was jealous; he sulked when Chet paid Mac attention and was a scornful spectator at Mac’s training sessions. This early jealousy came to a head about the time Mac got his full stature—in a fight over a field mouse. It happened in the orchard, where Chet was piling hay round his trees. Mac dug the mouse out of the grass, Old Tantrybogus stole it and Mac went for him.
Tantry was old, but strength was still in him, and some measure of craft. He got a neck hold and it is probable he would have killed Mac then and there if Chet had not interfered. As it was, Chet broke the hold, punished both dogs and chained them up for days till by every language a dog can muster they promised him to behave themselves. They never fought again. Mac had for Tantry a deep respect; Job had for Mac—having established his ascendancy—a mild and elderly affection.
In Tantry’s thirteenth year during the haying Mac caught a mouse one day and brought it and gave it to the older dog; and Chet, who saw the incident, slapped his knee and cried, “Now ain’t that comical?”
About his twelfth year old Tantry’s bark had begun to change. Little by little it lost the deeper notes of the years of his prime; it lost the certainty and decision which were always a part of the dog. It began to crack, as an old man’s voice quavers and cracks. A shrill querulous note was born in it. Before he was thirteen his bark had an inhuman sound and Chet could hardly bear to hear it. On gunning days while Chet was preparing to take the field with Mac, Old Tantrybogus would dance unsteadily round him, barking this hoarse, shrill, delighted bark.
It was like seeing an old man gamboling; it was age aping youth. There was something pitiful in it, and Chet used to swear and chain Tantry to his kennel and bid him—abusively—be still.
The chain always silenced Tantry. He would lie in the kennel, head on his paws in the doorway, and watch Chet and Mac start away, with never a sound. And at night when they came home Chet would show him the birds and Tantry would snuffle at them eagerly, then hide his longing under a mask of condescension as though to say that woodcock had been of better quality in his day.
In his thirteenth year age overpowered Tantry. His coat by this time was long; it hung in fringes from his thin flanks, through which the arched ribs showed. His head drooped, his tail dragged; his long hair was clotted into tangles here and there, because he was grown too old to keep himself in order. The joints of his legs were weak and he was splayfooted, his feet spreading out like braces on either side of him. When he walked he weaved like a drunken man; when he ran he collided with anything from a fence post to the barn itself. His eyes were rheumy. And he was pathetically affectionate, pushing his nose along Chet’s knee, smearing Chet’s trousers with his long white hairs. In his prime he had been a proud dog, caring little for caresses. This senile craving for the touch of Chet’s hand made Chet cry—and swear. It was at this time that Mary Thurman told Chet he ought to put Tantrybogus away.
“He’s too old for his own good,” she said—“half sick, and sore and uncomfortable. He ain’t happy, Chet.”
Chet told her that he would—some day. But the day did not come, and Mary knew it would not come. Nevertheless she urged Chet more than once to do the thing.
“You ought to. He’d be happier,” she said—“and so would you. You ain’t happy with him around.”
Chet laughed at her.
“I guess Old Tantry won’t bother me long as he wants to live,” he said.
“He makes you feel like an old man, Chet McAusland, just to look at him,” she protested. But Chet shook his head.
“I won’t feel old long as I can see you,” he told her.
So Old Tantry lived on and grew more decrepit. One day in the winter of his thirteenth year he followed Chet down into the wood lot and hunted him out there—and was so weary from his own exertions that Chet had to carry the dog up the hill and home and put him to bed in the barn.
“I ought to put you away, Tantry,” he said to himself as he gave the weary old creature a plate of supper. “It’s time you were going, old dog. But I can’t—I can’t.”
His fourteenth year saw Tantrybogus dragging out a weary life. Till then there had been nothing the matter with him save old age, but in his fourteenth summer a lump appeared on his right side against the ribs, and it was as large as a nut before Chet one day discovered it. Thereafter it grew. And at times when the old dog lay down on that side he would yelp with pain and get up hurriedly and lie down on the other side. By September the lump was half as large as an apple. And when Chet touched it Tantry whined and licked Chet’s hand in a pitiful appeal. Even then Chet would not do that which Mary wished him to do.
“He’ll go away some day and I’ll never see him again,” he told her. “But as long as he wants to stay—he’ll stay.”
“It’s cruel to the dog,” Mary told him. “You keep him, but you won’t let him do what he wants to do. I’m ashamed of you, Chet McAusland.”
Chet laughed uncomfortably.
“I can’t help it, Mary,” he said.