The Heart of a Dog

by Albert Payson Terhune

Now, never in his brief life had Lochinvar Bobby found his own meals. Never had he so much as caught a mouse or rifled a garbage pail. In sanitary man-made kennel run and hutch had he passed all his time. Not his had been the human companionship which sharpens a collie’s brain as much as does stark need. And he had no experience of food, save that which had been served him in a tin dish. He did not know that food grows in any other form or place.

But here was no tin dish heaped with scientifically balanced, if uninspired, rations. Here was no manner of food at all. Bobby nosed about among the dead leaves and the mould of his new-found den. Nothing was there which his sense of smell recognised as edible. And goaded by the scourge of hunger he ventured out again into the night. The wind had dropped. But the cold had only intensified; and a light snow was still sifting down.

Bobby stood and sniffed. Far off, his sensitive nostrils told him, was human habitation. Presumably that meant food was there, too. Humans and food, in Bobby’s experience, always went together. The pup followed the command of his scent and trotted dubiously toward the distant man-reek.

In another quarter-hour the starving pup was sniffing about the locked kitchen door of a farmhouse. Within, he could smell milk and meat and bread. But that was all the good it did him. Timidly he skirted the house for ingress. Almost had he completed the round when a stronger odour smote his senses. It was a smell which, of old he would have disregarded. But, with the primal impulse of famine, other atavistic traits were stirring in the back of his necessity-sharpened brain.

His new scent was not of prepared food, but of hot and living prey. Bobby paused by the unlatched door of the farm chicken coop. Tentatively he scratched at the white-washed panel. Under the pressure the door swung inward. Out gushed a pleasant warmth and a monstrously augmented repetition of the whiff which had drawn him to the henhouse.

Just above him, well within reach, perched fifteen or twenty feathery balls of varicoloured fluff. And famine did the rest.

Acting on some impulse wholly beyond his ken, Bobby sprang aloft and drove his white milk teeth deep into the breast of a Plymouth Rock hen.

Instantly, his ears were assailed by a most ungodly racket. The quiet hencoop was hideous with eldritch squawks and was alive with feathers. All Bobby’s natural fear urged him to drop this flapping and squawking hen and to run for his life.

But something infinitely more potent than fear had taken hold upon him. Through his fright surged a sensation of mad rapture. He had set teeth in live prey. Blood was hot in his nostrils. Quivering flesh was twisting and struggling between his tense jaws. For the moment he was a primitive forest beast.

Still gripping his noisy five-pound burden, he galloped out of the hencoop and across the barnyard; heading instinctively for the lair in which he had found a soft bed and safety from human intruders. As he fled, he heard a man’s bellowing voice. A light showed in an upper window of the house. Bobby ran the faster.