Jan: A Dog and a Romance

by A. J. Dawson

The greatest adventure of his infancy came when he was just twenty-eight days old. The time was late afternoon on a warm day. Having thrust his sister out from the coolest innermost corner of the cave, the black-and-gray pup had curled himself up there, and was sleeping soundly, while his sister lay somewhat nearer the opening of the cave. Had the weather been less warm, the black-and-gray pup would have used his sister as a pillow, a blanket, or a mattress, and in that case the adventure might have ended differently. As it was, his dream fancies were suddenly dispelled by the coming of a musky, acrid odor that swept across his small but sensitive nostrils with much the same effect that a sound box on the ear would have upon a sleeping child.

He awoke with a jerk, to see silhouetted against the irregular path of sky that was framed by the cave's mouth the figure of a full-grown mother fox. This vixen was closely related to the red fox to whom this cave had formerly belonged. She had long since learned of Reynard's end, of course, and, indeed, had seen his corpse within twenty-four hours of the execution. Though frequently moved by curiosity, she had never before ventured so near to the cave and would hardly have been there now but for the fact that she had seen Desdemona hunting a mile away and more. Now she peered in at the cave's mouth, informing herself chiefly through her sharp nose regarding its condition and inhabitants.

The black-and-gray pup snarled furiously, and the vixen leaped backward on the instant. Reflection made her scornfully ashamed of this movement, and she stepped delicately forward again. The smaller pup whimpered fearfully, and that was the poor thing's death-knell. The vixen promptly broke its neck with one snap of her powerful jaws and dragged the little creature out into the sunshine. All this time Master Black-and-Gray had been growling fiercely—his entire small body quivering under the strain of producing this martial sound. His fat back was pressed hard against the rear wall of the cave—partly, perhaps, to give him courage, and partly, no doubt, by way of getting a better purchase, so to say, for the task of growling, which really required all his small stock of strength.

Outside the cave, in the sunshine, the vixen was sniffing and nosing at the body of the puppy she had killed. She presented her flank to Black-and-Gray's view, and, for herself, could see nothing inside the cave now. Black-and-Gray had seen his sister slain. The blood of great aristocrats and heroes was in his veins. His wrath was tremendous, overwhelming, in fact, and, but for the support of the cave's wall, would certainly have been too much for his still uncertain sense of balance. Suddenly now his ancestry spoke in this undeveloped creature. Determination took and shook him, and spurred him forward. With a sort of miniature roar—the merest little mixture of breathless growl, snarl, and embryonic bark—he blundered forth from his dark corner, hurtling over the cave's floor at a gait partaking of roll, crawl, and gallop, and flung himself straight at the well-furred throat of the unsuspecting vixen.

Even as an accomplished swordsman may be wounded by the unexpectedness of the onslaught of some ignorant youngster who hardly knows a sword's pommel from its point, so this murderously inclined vixen was bowled over by the astounding attack of Master Black-and-Gray. The slope was very steep and the pup's spring a bolt from the blue. The vixen slipped, lost her footing, and went slithering down the dry grass from the ledge, snapping at the air as she slid, with bites, any one of which would easily have closed Black-and-Gray's career if they had reached him. But the puppy was quite powerless to put on the brake, so to say, and his progress down the slope was therefore far more rapid than that of the vixen. The breath was entirely knocked out of Black-and-Gray when he finally was brought up, all standing, by a sharp little rise of ground alongside the gap past which one saw across the Sussex weald from Desdemona's cave. Here it seemed he must pay the ultimate penalty of his unheard-of temerity, and be despatched by the now thoroughly angered vixen at her leisure.

But in that same moment a number of other things happened. In the first place, having reached it from the far side of the ridge, Desdemona appeared beside the mouth of her cave, dangling a young rabbit from her jaws. In the second place, Finn appeared, climbing from the landward side, in the gap beside which the puppy came to the end of its long tumbling flight. Midway between the gap and the cave, the startled vixen crouched on the slope, turning her head from the terrible vision of Finn, upward to the scarcely less alarming vision of Desdemona, now sniffing in the fact of her little daughter's murder.

The position was a parlous one for the vixen, and as she pulled herself together for flight along the side of the slope she doubtless regretted bitterly the curiosity which had impelled her to visit the den of her departed relative.

The vixen leaped warily and doubled with real agility. But Finn was easily her master in the arts of the chase, and his strength was ten times greater than that of any fox in Sussex. The vixen was still well within sight from Desdemona's cave when her time came. She leaped and snapped, and faced overwhelming odds without wavering, but her race was run when the wolfhound's great weight bore her to the earth and his massive jaw closed about her ruff as a vise grips wood.

And in the moment of the vixen's death, just as Master Black-and-Gray so far recovered his breath and his senses as to sit up and take stock of himself; a pony's nose appeared in the gap alongside him and introduced another new experience into this adventurous puppy's life. The pony must have appeared to his gaze very much as an elephant would appear to a child upon first view. But Black-and-Gray growled threateningly, though he did take two or three backward steps. On the pony's back sat Betty Murdoch, who now slid to the ground and knelt down beside the pup.

Then Desdemona came shuffling down the slope with reassuring little whines of response to her son's growling. And to these there came Finn, a trifle winded, and bearing traces of blood and fur about his bearded gray muzzle. So Master Black-and-Gray, whose knowledge of his fellow-inhabitants of the earth had hitherto been confined to Finn and Desdemona and his own brothers and sisters—now defunct—found himself, at the close of this most adventurous afternoon, the center of an admiring, wondering circle formed by his mother and her wolfhound mate, and the pony and Betty Murdoch. Having regarded each one among his audience in turn questioningly, he finally waddled out to his mother and thrust his somewhat bruised little nose greedily into her hanging dugs, so that Desdemona, forgetful for the moment of other matters, was impelled to lower herself to the turf and yield sustenance to her only surviving offspring.