When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

The morning through you trudge, buoyant and tireless and fancy-free; fighting Indians and bears and wildcats at will, yet still unscathed; roving up hill and down again, scaling cliffs and threading valleys, essaying perilous fords, and bursting the jungles of raspberry-bushes; and you guess at noon, and sprawl in the shade, beside the creek, to devour your provisions.

During the morning, some of the time you have seen the dog, and some of the time you have not. Where you have covered miles he has covered leagues, and more than leagues; for a half-hour he will have disappeared entirely, then, suddenly, right athwart your path he hustles past, in his orbit, as though to let you know that he is hovering about.

While you are eating, here he comes. He seats himself expectantly before you, with lolling tongue, and gulps half a slice of bread, and looks for more. A dog’s only selfishness is his appetite. He will freeze for you, drown for you, risk himself in a hundred ways for you, but in the matter of food he will seize what he can get and all he can get, and you must take care of yourself.

The lunch is finished, and the dog, after sniffing for the crumbs, sinks down with his nose between his paws, to indulge in forty uneasy winks until you indicate what is to be the next event upon your program.

Presently, however, with a little whine of restlessness, he is off.

You are off, too. It is the noon siesta. The air is sluggish. The birds and the squirrels have relaxed, and the woods are subdued. The strident scrape of the locusts rises and falls, and the distant shouts of men in harvest-fields float in upon your ear. You are burning hot; but the water of the creek is cool—the only cool thing in your landscape. A swim, a swim! Your whole being demands that you go in swimming.

The dog already has been in a number of times, as his wet coat has evidenced. Feverishly following the winding stream, envying the turtles as they plunge in, upon your approach, you arrive at a bend where the banks are high, and the current, swinging against them, halts and forms an eddy. Here the depths are still and dark and beckoning.

To strip those smothering garments from your sunburnt body is the work of but an instant, and in you souse, not without some misgiving as to possible water-snakes and snapping turtles, but spurred by a keen rivalry as to which shall “wet over” the first.