Buff: A Collie, and Other Dog-Stories

by Albert Payson Terhune

Tam knew his own mortal peril. He knew it even before Trask Frayne came rushing out from his watching-place, brandishing the gun, club-fashion. The collie did not try to wrench free and thereby to hurry the process of breaking his leg or of tearing out the shoulder-muscles. He thought, as quickly as the mongrel had lunged.

Rearing his head aloft, he drove down at the Black. The latter was clinging with all his might to the collie’s foreleg. And, in the rapture of having gained at last a disabling grip, he ignored the fact that he had left an opening in his own defence;—an opening seldom sought in a fight, except by a wolf or a wolf’s descendant.

It was for this opening that Tam-o’-Shanter struck. In a trice his white teeth had buried themselves in the exposed nape of the Black’s neck.

Here, at the brain’s base, lies the spinal cord, dangerously within reach of long and hard-driven fangs. And here, Tam had fastened himself.

An instant later,—but an instant too late,—the Black knew his peril. Releasing his grip on the collie’s leg, before the bone had begun to yield, he threw his great body madly from side to side, fighting crazily to shake off the death-hold. With all his mighty strength, he thrashed about.

Twice, he lifted the seventy-pound collie clean off the ground. Once he fell, with Tam under him. But the collie held on. Tam did more than hold on. Exerting every remaining atom of his waning power, he let his body be flung here and there, in the Black’s struggles; and he concentrated his force upon cleaving deeper and deeper into the neck-nape.

This was the grip whereby the Black, a month agone, had crushed the life out of friendly little Wisp. And, by chance or by fate, Tam had been enabled to gain the same hold. Spasmodically, he set his fangs in a viselike tightening of his grip.

At one instant, the Black was whirling and writhing in the fulness of his wiry might. At the next, with a sickening snapping sound, his giant body went limp. And his forequarters hung, a lifeless weight, from his conqueror’s jaws.

Tam relaxed his hold. The big black body slumped to earth and lay there. The collie, panting and swaying, stood over his dead enemy. The bitterly long quest was ended. Heavenward went his bleeding muzzle. And he waked the solemn stillnesses of the summer night with an eerie wolf howl, the awesome primal yell of Victory.

For a few seconds Trask Frayne, unnoticed, stared at his dog. And, as he looked, it seemed to him he could see the collie change gradually back from a wild thing of the forests to the staunch and adoring watchdog of other days. Then the man spoke.