Lad: A Dog

by Albert Payson Terhune

Wolf, however, was at the stage of extreme youth when neither dogs nor humans are bothered by premonitions. Ahead of him stretched the huge sheet of ice whereon he loved to gambol. Straightway he frisked out upon it.

A rough growl of warning from Lad made him look back, but the lure of the ice was stronger than the call of duty.

The current, at this point of the lake, twisted sharply landward in a half-circle. Thus, for a few yards out, the rotting ice was still thick, but where the current ran, it was thin, and as soggy as wet blotting-paper—as Wolf speedily discovered.

He bounded on the thinner ice driving his hind claws into the slushy surface for his second leap. He was dismayed to find that the ice collapsed under the pounding feet. There was a dull, sloppy sound. A ten-foot ice-cake broke off from the main sheet; breaking at once into a dozen smaller cakes; and Wolf disappeared, tail first, into the swift-running water beneath.

To the surface he came, at the outer edge of the hole. He was mad, clear through, at the prank his beloved lake had played on him. He struck out for shore. On the landward side of the opening his forefeet clawed helplessly at the unbroken ledge of ice. He had not the strength or the wit to crawl upon it and make his way to land. The bitter chill of the water was already paralyzing him. The strong current was tugging at his hindquarters. Anger gave way to panic. The puppy wasted much of his remaining strength by lifting up his voice in ear-splitting howls.

The Mistress and the Master, motoring into the drive from the highway nearly a quarter-mile distant, heard the racket. The lake was plainly visible to them through the bare trees, even at that distance, and they took in the impending tragedy at a glance. They jumped out of the car and set off at a run to the water-edge. The way was long and the ground was heavy with mud. They could not hope to reach the lake before the puppy's strength should fail.

But Lad was already there. At Wolf's first cry, Lad sprang out on the ice that heaved and chucked and cracked under his greater weight. His rush carried him to the very edge of the hole, and there, leaning forward and bracing all four of his absurdly tiny white paws, he sought to catch the puppy by the neck and lift him to safety. But before his rescuing jaws could close on Wolf's fur, the decayed ice gave way beneath his weight, and the ten-foot hole was widened by another twenty feet of water.

Down went Lad with a crash, and up he came, in almost no time, a few feet away from where Wolf floundered helplessly among the chunks of drifting ice. The breaking off of the shoreward mass of ice, under Lad's pressure, had left the puppy with no foothold at all. It had ducked him and had robbed him even of the chance to howl.

His mouth and throat full of water, Wolf strangled and splashed in a delirium of terror. Lad struck out for him, butting aside the impending ice-chunks with his great shoulders, and swimming with a rush that lifted a third of his tawny body out of water. His jaws gripped Wolf by the middle of the back, and he swam thus with him toward shore. At the edge of the shoreward ice he gave a heave which called on every numbing muscle of the huge frame, and which—in spite of the burden he held—again lifted his head and shoulders high above water.

He thus flung Wolf's body halfway up on the ledge of ice. The puppy's flying forepaws chanced to strike the ice-surface. His sharp claws bit into its soft upper crust. With a frantic wriggle he was out of the water and on top of this thicker stratum of shore-ice, and in a second he had regained shore and was careering wildly up the lawn toward the greater safety of his kennel.