Of course the fat pup was helpless in the deep snow, but he would go plunging into their snow-shoe tracks, leaping from one to another with the most joyous barking and wriggling and flapping of ears.
Sometimes he caught up with them. Then he would try to steal a ride on the back of a snow-shoe, till they discovered why it was so hard to lift that foot.
After awhile they taught him to help them bring in the firewood. Giving him just one small stick at a time to take between his jaws, they had him trotting ahead of them, every trip they made.
Later they made him a harness and taught him to drag their light sled over the snow crust, though he would have to grow a lot before he could bring in wood that way. To both the children and the pup it was all just fun. They wouldn’t have enjoyed it a bit if they had had to do it.
“I do believe that pup’s going to pan out a regular dog,” the Ranger decided. “I tell you what, it takes these mongrels for just plain, ordinary brains,—not the kind that bird dogs have, nor fighting dogs, nor any special kind, but just plain all-’round brains.”
“And heart,” added his wife softly, watching the children romping with Wiggledy on the hearth rug. “I’ll feel now, if anything happened to the children when they’re out snow-shoeing, he’ll come and tell me, or die fighting for them.”
“I hadn’t noticed that he was particularly scrappy.”
“Ho, ho! You haven’t seen him chasing Clickety-Clack. I wonder how he’ll hit it off with the little bear.”
“That we shall see when spring comes.”
Now Ring-tail had formed the habit of sleeping on the children’s bed. When Wiggledy first came, he was so tiny and so lonesome that he, too, was taken under cover. About this time the excitement began.