The Heart of a Dog

by Albert Payson Terhune

He left the door open behind him. Into the kitchen seeped the deadly chill of night. It struck the miserable Bobby and roused him from the apathy of fright into which his advent to the bright room had immersed him.

The fright remained, but the impotence to move was gone. Fear had been born in his cringing soul, from the harsh treatment meted out to him in the place of his birth by kennel men who scoffed at his worthlessness. Fear had increased fifty fold by his long and clangorous journey across half the continent. Now, fear came to a climax.

He had cowered in helpless terror before these strangers, here in the closed room. He had sensed their hostility. But now for an instant the strangers had left him. Yes, and the back door was standing ajar—the door to possible escape from the unknown dangers which beset him on all sides.

Tucking his ratlike tail between his cow-hocks, Bobby put down his head and bolted. Through the doorway he scurried, dodging behind the legs of Jamie Mackellar as he fled through the refrigerator-blocked areaway. Jamie heard the scrambling footfalls, and turned in time to make a belated grab for the fleeing dog.

He missed Bobby by an inch; and the man’s gesture seemed to the pup a new menace. Thus had Roke and the other kennel men struck at him in early days; or had seized him by tail or hind leg as he fled in terror from their beatings.

Out into the unfenced yard galloped the panic-driven Bobby. And through the pitch blackness Mackellar stumbled in utterly futile pursuit. The sound of Jamie’s following feet lent new speed to the cowed youngster. Instead of stopping, after a few moments, he galloped on, with his ridiculous wavering and sidewise gait.

Mackellar lived on the outskirts of the suburb, which, in turn, was on the outskirts of the city. By chance or by instinct Bobby struck ahead for the rocky ridge which divided denser civilisation from the uncleared wilderness and the patches of farm country to the north. Nor did the puppy cease to run until he had topped, puffingly, the ridge’s summit. There he came to a shambling halt and peered fearfully around him.

On the ridge-crest, the wind was blowing with razor sharpness. It cut like a billion waxed whiplashes, through the sparse coat and against the sagging ribs of the pup. It drove the snow needles into his watering eyes, and it stung the blown-back insides of his sensitive ears. He cowered under its pitiless might, as under a thrashing; and again he began to whimper and to sob.

Below him, from the direction whence he had wormed his slippery way up the ridge, lay the squalidly flat bit of plain with its sprinkle of mean houses; behind it, the straggling suburb whence he had escaped; and behind that, the far-reaching tangle of glare and blackness which was Midwestburg, with miles of lurid light reflection on the low-hanging clouds.

Turning, the puppy looked down the farther slope of his ridge to the rolling miles of forest and clearing, with wide-scattered farmsteads and cottages. The wilds seemed less actively and noisily terrifying than the glare and muffled roar of the city behind him. And, as anything was better than to cower freezing there in the wind’s full path, Bobby slunk down the ridge’s northern flank and toward the naked black woodlands beyond its base.