Bruno; or, lessons of fidelity, patience, and self-denial taught by a dog

by Jacob Abbott

“Bruno,” said he, “I must lie down here and rest a little, before I can go on any further.”

Bruno tries to encourage and save his master.

But Bruno, when he saw his master preparing to lie down, jumped about him, and barked, and seemed very uneasy. Just then the hunter saw before him a deep black hole. He looked down, and saw that it was water. Instead of being in the road, he was going over some deep pit filled with water, covered, except in one place, with ice and snow. He perceived that he had had a very narrow escape from falling into this water, and he now felt more bewildered and lost than ever. He contrived to get by the dangerous hole, feeling his way with a stick, and then he sank down in the snow among the rocks, and gave up in despair.

The hunter comes very near perishing in the snow.

And yet the house was very near. The chimney and the gable end of it could just be distinguished in the distance through the falling snow. Bruno knew this, and he was extremely distressed that his master should give up when so near reaching home. He lay down in the snow by the side of his master, and putting his paw over his arm, to encourage him and keep him from absolute despair, he turned his head toward the house, and barked loud and long, again and again, in hopes of bringing somebody to the rescue.

In the picture you can see the hunter lying in the snow, with Bruno over him. His cap has fallen off, and is half buried. His stick, too, lies on the snow near his cap. That was a stick that he got to feel down into the hole in the ice with, in order to ascertain how deep the water was, and to find his way around it. The rocks around the place are covered with snow, and the branches of the trees are white with it.

Danger of going to sleep when out in a storm.

It is extremely dangerous to lie down to sleep in the snow in a storm like this. People that do so usually never wake again. They think, always, that they only wish to rest themselves, and sleep a few minutes, and that then they will be refreshed, and be ready to proceed on their journey. But they are deceived. The drowsiness is produced, not by the fatigue, but by the cold. They are beginning to freeze, and the freezing benumbs all their sensations. The drowsiness is the effect of the benumbing of the brain.