by Robert Ruark
Another chore of the dog boy was to see that every kennel was aired daily and that the pine straw that made the bed was replaced weekly. We built simple kennels—a big packing box, stilted dry off the ground on bricks, with a flap top that could be turned back on its hinges to let the sun in. Pine straw, I do believe, is still the cleanest and warmest material for a dog nest, as it seems to have some sort of aromatic resistance to insects. Also, it was great fun going out once a week in the towering (to a small boy) forests to sweep bagfuls of the clean brown needles in the hushed cathedral of the pine groves. If I was feeling especially virtuous I would also lug home a crocus sack full of the fallen cones, which made magnificent kindling and issued a lovely, almost incense-like smell—to grownups, that is. Me, I preferred the smell of baking bread.
The dog boy was simultaneously in charge of defleaing, and in the rare instances when mange crept unbidden into the run it was the dog boy who cured himself as well as the afflicted animal with a tremendously potent mixture of burnt crankcase oil and sulphur. Neither the dog boy nor the dog smelled so good as formerly, but the mange generally departed.
Today I know that most things seem better in retrospect, but I cannot begin to tell you the thrill there is in taking a hand-trained puppy, a puppy you’ve sweated through babyhood, adolescence, manners, mange, and his natural exuberance of spirit, into the woods and have him make you look good in front of your elders.
“Dogs are kind of like people,” the Old Man said once. “You generally get out of ‘em what you put in ‘em. There’s good dogs and bad dogs, dumb dogs and smart dogs that are actually too big for their britches, but, mainly speaking, you can correct up or down and get yourself a decent four-legged citizen if you go about it right. A taste of the switch and a little explanation as to why, and you got yourself a dog that won’t run rabbits and a boy that won’t stick up banks.”
Every time I read a new headline about that poor dog in the sputnik the Old Man kept coming back stronger than the beep. It had nothing to do with the sacrifice of dogs for science or any undue sentimentality about animals, as we know that a great many animals have died that people may live. It was just a sense of outrage at the unfitness of things, at the futility of using a dog—good, bad, or indifferent—where a dog didn’t belong.
“A working dog,” the Old Man said, “don’t belong to live in the house. A pet dog don’t belong to live outside the house. A pet dog is different from a work dog, but all dogs have a dignity that ought to be respected. And any lost hound worthy of his grits will eventually find his way home.”
I guess what made me real mad was that this critter wasn’t ever going to find her way home, and the fault was not hers. Somehow a dog has too much dignity to get her tail caught in any kind of machine away up yonder where she can’t hear a whistle.
20—Second Childhood Is More Fun than the First—I
A fellow I know turned forty the other day, and it had him mightiful down. Forty is a kind of rough year for a man. It is an October sort of year. You still wear the scars of old summer mosquito bites, but there is a prickling of frost on the pumpkin and there is more than a clammy hint of the winter crouching just behind the hill.
“I dunno what there is about forty,” the Old Man said once, referring acidly to the antics of some male relative, who seemed to be trying to convince himself that his capacity for the local corn-squeezing was limitless. “Seems to afflict most fellers about the middle of their thirty-ninth year. Sort of a final fling before they give up what they think is youth and force themselves to settle down with the idea of livin’ with a potbelly and a shiny head. You hear a lot of talk about women actin’ flighty when they start to crowd thirty. I tell you the honest-to-John truth, a woman on the edge of what she calls middle age ain’t half as fidgety and worrisome as a man.”
The Old Man grinned, and fired his pipe. “Ever occur to you that you’ll be forty someday?”
I guess I was about fifteen at the time, and sweating out every day that stood between me and a driving license, which became legally possible at sixteen. The idea of anybody being forty was outlandish, except for old people like my pa, who was nudging that ancient estate himself. It never occurred to me that the Old Man was any age at all. He had worn the same battered hat and the same shaggy mustache ever since I could remember. Even the yellow nicotine stains on the mustache hadn’t changed since we started knocking around like men together, when I was summ’at sixish.
“No sir,” I said. “It’s too far off.”
“It ain’t as far off as you think,” the Old Man replied. “You’ll find out that it’s just around the corner once you pass twenty-one and the years start to sneak up on you. The whole point, though, is not to miss nothing as they pass you by, and when you hit that real middle age don’t let it fret you none. I reckon the years between forty and sixty are the best a man’s apt to put in. He can do dang near anything as good as he could when he was a youngster, and what he can’t jump over he’s smart enough to walk around. Which would you say’s the best dog we got, Frank or Sandy?”
“Frank,” I said. I didn’t even have to stop to think. “Sure, Frank.” Our blue belton Llewellin had more bird sense in his backside than most dogs wear in their nose.
“Well,” the Old Man said, “Frank’s pretty near as old as me, if you average dog years into man years, and I sure ain’t no spring chicken. What is the main thing you notice about Frank when he hunts?”
I thought for a minute. “Well,” I said, “he don’t make many mistakes. And he takes his time. And he don’t run all over the place like a blame-fool puppy, pointing larks and chasing rabbits. He sure don’t waste many steps, come to think of it.”
The Old Man smiled approvingly. “There you got it in a nutshell. Now that Sandy’s a good dog, and he’ll steady down someday, but right now he’s got to run a mile and a half and lift his leg on every bush in the neighborhood before you can impress on him with a stick that he’s in the bird-huntin’ business. When he runs up a covey it ain’t because he don’t know any better or hasn’t been taught that it’s wrong. He’s just full of vinegar, and he hasn’t learned to put the brakes on his spirit. When he cocks his ears and half-points a rabbit he’s still playing. He knows damned well it’s a rabbit and he’s not supposed to notice it, but the puppy in him is just crying out loud for foolish expression and the rabbit is it.”
It was beginning to look like a long day. Also it was in between seasons: too late for doves and too early for quail and ducks. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to listen to the Old Man, but when he started to philosophize somehow it always seemed to wind up with work, with me doing most of it. I looked hopeful and kept my trap shut.
“Sandy reminds me of you,” the Old Man said. “Fit to bust with useless energy. He ain’t happy with today. He’s always over the next hill, looking for tomorrow. Right now you’re fretting yourself sick about getting to be sixteen, so you can drive the Liz legal.” He stressed the word “legal,” knowing very well that I had been driving that old tin tragedy on the sly since I was twelve. “Sixteen’ll get here fast enough, and so will twenty-one and so will forty and so will eighty, and then all of a sudden you’re dead before you realize what happened to all the time you wasted worry in’ about next Christmas when you ought to be happy with the Fourth of July.”
The Old Man rubbed his pipe on his nose, and looked at me like he was expecting me to say something. I didn’t oblige him. There didn’t seem to be much point to me worrying about being forty or eighty. It was still about thirty-seven days, six hours, and forty-two minutes until the bird season opened, and about forty-nine days, seven hours, and nine minutes until school let out for the holidays, and my birthday would come during the holidays....
“I know what you’re thinking,” the Old Man said. “You just can’t wait for the time to pass until something that you can’t do now gets to be possible, and then you’ll worry about how long it is before you can do it again. You start to fret on Chris
tmas Eve, because it’ll be three hundred and sixty-six days until next Christmas. You ain’t like me and Frank. We don’t false-point and we don’t run all over the place chasing stinkbirds, but we come home with the bacon more often than not, and we ain’t all wore out when we get home to the fire either. You bleed for an hour if you miss a bird, and you’re so busy worrying about the last one you missed, you miss the next one as well. There ain’t no such animal as hindsight positive action. All you can do is wipe up the spilt milk and try to do better with the present, and let the future come up sort of gradual. You got to learn to live with what you got.”
I begun to fidget. You can stand just so much high thinking on any given day when you are near-about sixteen. I wanted to do something.
The Old Man heaved a mock sigh. “I can see my fine-haired conversation is wasted on you,” he said. “Suppose you just run upstairs to my room and get me another tin of Prince Albert, and then we’ll go get arrested or something.”
I came back down with the tobacco. “Let’s go,” I said.
“Where?” the Old Man asked. “You call it.”
“Africa,” I said. “I want to shoot a lion. Or India. I want to shoot a tiger. I want to do it today. I don’t want to wait until I’m forty. Now, like you said. I don’t want life to pass me by.” The Old Man grinned. “Purty sassy, ain’t you? I reckon we don’t run much to lions and tigers around here, but mebbe I can provide something in the way of one of them what-do-you-call-its for you. About time you blooded yourself on dangerous game.” He grinned again and this time it was wicked.
“You ever read anything about them Bengal Lancers—the British soldier fellers in India that go wild pigstickin’? Well, wrap a rag around your hat and call it a puggree, I think that’s the name, and we’ll go boarstickin’. Except in the case of this pig I expect we better use buckshot. We’ll need some dogs. Just run over and ask Sam Watts if we can borrow a couple of his hounds. Bell and Blue’ll do.”
We tied up the bird dogs and slung the hounds in the back of the Liz. They lay flat on the back seat and drooled, their tongues lolloping sideways. Old Blue perked one coon-chewed ear. Cars meant guns, and guns meant hunting.
The Old Man looked at me kind of curiously. “Where’s the tents? And the salt and pepper and fat back and coffee and sugar? What kind of pigstickin’ expedition is this, anyhow? You don’t expect to stick a pig and come home the same night, do you? It might take five, six days. You might even have to miss a little school. I reckon that’ll worry you nigh to death, but sometimes you have to take the bitter with the sweet. And how about all the beaters and gunbearers and such as that? This ain’t just any old kind of pigstickin’ expedition.”
“I don’t know any beaters and gunbearers,” I said. The Old Man had me on the run. “This is all new to me.”
“I don’t see nothing wrong with some of Big Abner’s young’uns for beaters,” the Old Man said, more or less to himself. “He can easy spare half a dozen. And I reckon Pete and Tom’ll have to do for gunbearers. You better run down the road and tell them to be ready in half an hour. And tell Tom to bring his rifle. You can’t tell what we’ll run into in the jungle. Maybe a bobcat or a panther. Pity we haven’t got any tigers, but I reckon you’ll have to blame it all on geography. Somebody got careless and didn’t apportion none of them critters to these parts.”
Somebody must have got careless with Tom and Pete, too. I guess I’ve told you about them more’n once before. They were both lean, lantern-jawed, black-whiskered woodsmen, that some people said had a smidgen of Injun in them. They wore hip boots like other people wore shoes, in town and out, and they chawed tobacco constant. They made corn liquor in the winter, and drank it up in the spring. They fished in the summer and hunted in the fall. They worked a little bit when the menhaden—the pogies—were running and Mr. Charlie Gause’s fertilizer factory was standing in the need of fish scrap. I reckon they forgot more about woods and water than most fellers ever learned, and they weren’t above sharing it with me. They kidded me along, but it was gentle kidding. Pete was my special buddy. Tom, he was kind of surly sometimes. People said the Injun showed more strong in Tom, who could be a ring-tailed bear cat in a rough-and-tumble, when a little homemade whisky took a firm hold of him. I never saw him cut up nasty any, though. Mostly what I remember about Tom and Pete was that they were in on the death of the first deer I ever shot, and they stuck my face into the deer’s green, fodder-filled paunch.
“What’s Ned Hall up to now?” Pete said, when I panted up to the house, after running all the way. The house was a weathered-gray, ramshackledy house, what paint it had flaking off in scabby stretches. The porch had a hole rotted in one end of its planking, and the steps sagged sort of slanchwise. Tom and Pete were squatted on the steps, whittling and spitting tobacco juice in the sandy yard. Seems like I never saw either one of them when they weren’t doing something with a knife or a gun.
“He’s decided to go pigstickin’,” I said, out of breath. “You know him when he takes a notion to do something in a hurry. He said to tell you to bring the rifle, we might need it.”
Tom looked at Pete, and Pete looked at Tom.
Tom grunted. “Pigs, huh?”
“That’s what he said. He said you and Pete could be the gunbearers, and we could use some of Big Abner’s young’uns for beaters. Something about the Bengal Lancers, I dunno, but he said get a move on.”
Pete looked at Tom. He winked. “We was layin’ off to fix up the porch some,” he said. “The old woman’s been after us to hit a lick and fix it. You reckon...” He let the words drift.
“I reckon,” Tom said. “It’s been needin’ fixin’ for nigh onto three year now, and if she wasn’t hollerin’ about that it’d be somethin’ else. Come on, Pete. If the old gentleman wants to stick a pig I reckon we best go help him out. Tell Ned we’ll be ready when you come by.”
I dashed off over the sand hill again, and I thought I could hear the men snickering as I ran. I didn’t care if it was a snipe hunt. It was action, if it had Tom and Pete and two hound dogs mixed up in it, let alone pigs and Bengal Lancers.
The Old Man was pretty near ready when I got back. There was a stack of tentage and blankets and cooking equipment piled in a heap around the Lizzie.
“I already made some peace with your grandma,” he said. “Go get your huntin’ duds, and then help me load up this car. The boys coming? They ain’t drunk or in jail or anything like that?”
“They’re coming,” I said. “They said they’d be ready when we drove by. But they seem to think there was something awful funny about this trip. Is there?”
“Not that I know of,” the Old Man said. “Pigstickin’ is a very serious business. A feller can get hurt with the right pig unless he handles him careful. Come on now, let’s run off before Miss Lottie changes her mind.”
We picked up Tom and Pete and crammed them, somehow, into the back seat of the Liz with the dogs and guns and pots and pans. We jounced along on the corduroy road on the way out of town, and suddenly the Old Man started to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to stop the car until he got his breath back. Tom and Pete, they begun to laugh with him. I sat there kind of hurt, because I didn’t see anything to laugh at. I guess the Old Man must have noticed that I looked put out.
“Don’t take it to heart,” he said, “but does anything strike you as unusual about this trip—more than usual, I mean?”
“No sir,” I said.
“Well then,” the Old Man said, “look at us. Four grown men, past prime, two old flea-bit hounds, and a shirttail boy, all heading off to the jungles to play Bengal Lancer and stick pigs—at our age. I ain’t apt to see seventy again any time soon, and if they’d of kept records when they whelped Tom and Pete they’d be easy fifty, fifty-two. And Bell and Blue are mighty near as old as you are, which makes them about a hundred years old apiece as dogs go. But away we rush off to the woods, like a bunch of young’uns playin’ Injun. Remember what I told you earlier today abo
ut being forty years old ain’t quite the end of the world?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I sure do.” I looked around me at the Old Man and Tom and Pete and the dogs, and for a minute I felt older than any of them.
I told all this to my aging friend, the one who turned forty the other day, and was down in the dumps about it. He seemed to brighten considerably.
“Did you get any pigs?” he asked.
I said sure, we got some pigs, but I would tell him more later, after I soothed my old bones with a little painkiller.
You see, the Boy, which is me, had just turned forty-five, and was feeling his decrepitude in the joints.
21—Second Childhood Is More Fun than the First—II
The Old Man had squirreled away a supply of hand-hewn philosophy to fit most moods and conditions, and he was very fond of saying that a man was nothing but a boy grown old. He liked to say that if a feller was raised right it was powerful difficult to beat the boy out of him no matter how many hard knocks he absorbed in the painful process of achieving maturity.
“The measure of a grown man,” the Old Man said, “is just how much tomfoolery he can get away with when he’s got gray in his whiskers, without appearin’ to be a damned fool. I ain’t referrin’ to coon chasin’ and suchlike, because anybody that runs around tearing up his clothes in the woods at night behind a pack of hounds on the off-chance they’ll tree a coon is just lookin’ for an excuse to get drunk and fall in a briar patch.”
The Old Man did not utter these sage words, however, when he and Tom and Pete, the half-Injun woodsmen, decided to quench my thirst for youthful adventure and whip me off on what he referred to as a pigstickin’ expedition. We were, as I was saying, supposed to be what he called Bengal Lancers, and we were going to hunt pigs the hard way. Not sticking them with a lance, on horseback, as the Lancers did in India, but using hounds to course them, and after that it was every man—and pig—for himself.
