“But we—we couldn’t find our way home,” said Don.
“No, and that shows you ought not to go too far off until you know how to get back,” said Mrs. Gurr. “Now as soon as you get dry, Don, I’ll give you all some lessons in how to find your way back home again, when you get so far off you can’t see it.”
It did not take Don long to get dry in the warm sun, and then the lessons began. For dogs, even puppy dogs, have to learn their lessons, you know, just as you children do.
They have to learn to eat only the things that are good for them. Sometimes a puppy will gnaw on a cake of soap, but he does not do it more than once, for he finds out it makes him ill. And dogs have to learn to come when their master calls them, and to lie down when they are told, and to shake “hands,” and do other tricks—especially in a circus.
So Mrs. Gurr showed Don, and his brothers and sisters, how to sniff and smell along the ground, so they would know their way back again when they had gone away from home. Dogs, you know, have very good noses for smell. Even on a dark night, when a dog cannot see, he can tell, just by sniffing the air, whether his master is coming along, or whether it is some one else.
So, when a dog takes a new road his paws leave sort of a smell in the dust. This smell stays there for some time, and when the dog wants to get back, he just sniffs and smells along the road until he finds where he has made his tracks before, and in that way he gets home again. He can do that even in the dark.
It was this lesson that Don’s mother taught him, until he and the other puppies could run a long way off from their kennel, even in the woods, and could find their way back again.
“Now you will not get lost again, Don,” said his mother to him.
“And I don’t want to,” Don said. “Being lost is no fun.”
The puppy dog family lived in the kennel for some time longer. The little doggies were all growing larger and stronger, and could run about now without falling down so often. Don grew faster and larger than any of the others.