Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road

by Katharine Lee Bates

Then shakes his powder'd coat, and barks for joy."

As for dramatics, Sigurd loved to thrust his stick deep into a pile of russet leaves or sparkling snow, and then pretend that he was a sanguinary monster whose prey had escaped him, and dig and nose and scrape and scatter and tear and shuffle with frenzied energy, rumbling all the while growls of awful menace, until he had tossed it up to seize and worry, display to the audience always requisite for these performances, and then bury it again for a repetition of the melodrama.

When the winter storms kept him in, his surging vitality made him as restless as an imprisoned wind. If the Cave of Æolus boasted a housekeeper, she had our sympathy. All day long Sigurd would scoot and spin about the little range of rooms that we liked to have quiet and orderly, a very electric battery of mischief. He would pick quarrels with the rugs, scatter the pile of newspapers and dance a scandalous jig with that elderly, respectable Bostonian, The Transcript. He would bump into a gracefully leaning broom and a meditative mop, knocking their wooden wits together and bringing them to the floor with what he considered a beautiful bang. He would stir up civil war on the hearth till poker and tongs and dust-brush and bellows all set upon one another with hideous clang of combat. At last we would toss over to him, in desperation, an old pair of rubbers, and he would make love to one and try to swallow the other, playing as many parts as Bottom longed for, all the way from Pyramus to Lion.

A new stage was provided for him when the storm was over and we undertook to shovel the drift off the piazza. He would instantly claim the star rôle of rival shovel, pawing the powdery heaps with delirious zest, or he would be the snow itself, ecstatically indignant at being swept down the steps. He played thrilling tragi-comedies with bones, too, especially with one monstrous knuckle that might have belonged to the skeleton of Polyphemus, the prize of one of Sigurd's evening prowls. It was a bitter cold midnight, but our happy rebel, sporting with that giant joint, tossing it about in the snow, losing it on purpose, catching its glimmer by grace of the moon and madly pouncing on it once more, would not obey the bed-time whistle. He stretched himself out, a saffron blotch on the white, and hugged his treasure, crunching away persuasively to convince us that the clock was wrong and it was still only dinner time. Our ignominious resort, in such a case, was to fetch from a certain pantry box, the daily object of Sigurd's supplicating sniffs, a piece of cake, and proceed to eat it, with vulgar smack of ostentatious relish, in the doorway, under the electric light. As ever, this stratagem brought our mutineer to terms. Giving the bone a last affectionate lick, he came bounding into the hall in time for the crumbs. But his high spirits were far from spent. Though he consented to play Yellow Caterpillar, curling up in the blanketed round clothes-basket which, for the winter, displaced his Thunder-and-Lightning rug, he barked so often through the small hours, in his dreams or out, that our slumbers were literally curtailed. Rebuked into silence, he gnawed his leash in two, tipped over his basket and settled himself for a morning snooze on the forbidden lounge.

It is obvious that Sigurd was not a model of virtue. We did not want him so much better than ourselves. "That dog would be improved by a good licking," said Joy-of-Life's visiting elder brother. But with all respect for elder brothers—my own had nearly hanged Sigurd by an ingenious contrivance of ropes and loops designed to enable me to unleash him on a summer morning from my sleeping balcony—we decided that we would rather have our collie with all his frolic imperfections on his head than cowed into slavish obedience. Only once when, hardly out of puppyhood, he dashed from my side, as we were walking decorously on the sidewalk, and danced backward on his hind legs in front of a dodging automobile, out-barking its distracted horn, did I attempt to whip him. He had barely escaped with life and limb and, determined to impress him, for his own safety, with his wrong-doing, I caught him by the collar, doubled the leash which I still carried but had almost ceased to use, and began to beat him with it about the head. Sigurd's astonished yelp was answered in an instant from the side street where dwelt the Sisters and, like a white knight of chivalry, Laddie came charging out, thrusting himself between us, leaping upon me and demanding, with a wrath seldom seen in his gentle eyes, that I stop maltreating his twin.

Of course the brothers took the chance to run away together. It was slushy going and when Sigurd came home at seven o'clock, so tired that he could hardly drag one muddy foot after another, he was in shocking trim, his white hose and shirt-front soaked to a disreputable gray. It was unlucky, for his amateur dramatics were to be crowned that evening by a public part on the college stage. He was to be Faithful Dog, watching beside his master,—a forgotten hero of the Revolution,—as that gallant young lieutenant slept away the hour before daybreak, when he was to be executed as a spy. At a low whistle of the rescuer beneath the window, Faithful Dog was to arouse his master by placing a wary paw upon the sleeper's breast and, when the lieutenant had made good his escape, remain behind to face the angry guard and be shot extremely dead in his master's place. Sigurd had thrown himself into this noble rôle with enthusiasm and rehearsed it several times with distinguished success.

An escort of sophomores had been waiting for him in an agony of impatience and, when he at last arrived, there could be no thought of dinner or a nap. Sigurd was hustled down to the laundry, put through merciless ablutions and rushed off to the college barn, our impromptu theater, in the snug little vehicle that our liveryman called his "coop." Three or four girls were sardined in with him, flourishing towels and doing their best to scrub him dry on the way. But it was a ruffled, soapsudsy and excessively drowsy Faithful Dog that trotted out upon the stage, yawned in the face of the rapturous greeting of his congregated friends, the Barn Swallows, jumped up on the prison cot, never meant for him, and rolled himself into a solid slumber-ball, refusing to wake, not even so much as blink, from first to last of the drama. With natural presence of mind, an essential quality in spies, the hero soliloquized to the audience that his Faithful Dog had been drugged, evoking a round of applause at which Sigurd dreamily flapped his tail.

One rôle that he never could be induced to play was that of Dandy. One Sunday afternoon, when he came limping in with his feet all cut and sore from a morning frisk over rough ice, I dressed them in discarded white kid gloves, tying each firmly round the ankle, and started out with Sigurd for a call on the Dryad. But our sturdy Viking resented such dudish apparel and would flump down, at brief intervals, on the crusted drifts and tug away at that detested frippery with the result that, on his arrival, only the paw he thrust out at his amused hostess was still elegant in a tatter of white kid.

Sigurd believed in elective courses rather than required. There were certain things that, as a matter of principle, he persistently refused to learn. Though by nature a dig, as my sister's flower-beds too often testified, not her most fervent remonstrances could convince him that bulbs and bones should not be planted together. His general attitude toward education was not unique. He had "come to college for the life." From the narrow paths of learning he bounded off in pursuit of a "well-rounded development." His social engagements were numerous and pressing. Often he had not time, between afternoon tea in one dormitory and a birthday spread in another, to scamper home for the plain parenthesis of a dog-biscuit dinner. Sometimes we would hear our truant, in the small hours, drop down upon the porch with a thud of utter exhaustion, and would learn by degrees, during the next day or two, that he had gone with a botany or geology class on a long morning tramp, played hare and hounds with one of the athletic teams all the afternoon and paraded the town till midnight with a serenading party. Often in the spring weather we would not set eyes on him for two days running, or might, perhaps, catch a passing glimpse of our collie standing expectant on the stone wall by the East Lodge, watching the stream of girls and waiting for his next invitation. He would dutifully greet us with a bark and a caper and, if we were driving, jump down to follow the carriage, but if one of his student chums came tripping along and threw her arms about him, showering kisses on his sunny head, Sigurd would flourish his tail in rapturous response and off the two would race to "Math." or "Lit." or "Chem." or "Comp." or whatever other branch of knowledge Young America cannot spare breath to pronounce.

We would often see him lying impartially across the knees of a group of girls studying together in some green nook, his plume waving in the faces clustered over Horace or Livy. He had nothing but admiration for such guileless renderings as "The swift hunter pursuing the leper" or "He landed his boats in the sea," and the harder these latter-day Humanists hugged him, the more he sneezed and yawned in a very embarrassment of joy, though when, absorbed in subjunctives, they pinched his silky ears a trifle too hard, he would quietly withdraw and hunt up a stick for them to throw for Sigurd. Not all his mates were wise in their good-will. They would pick up and toss, for him to chase and worry, rough-broken, splintery pieces of painted board or anything that came handy, and presently a lugubrious dog would appear before his family, laying at our feet, perhaps, a well-licked strip of picket fence, and lifting for our ministrations a bleeding mouth, where the red was mingled with a stain of sickly green.