Quotes from Albert Payson Terhune

With grim care the Master and the superintendent watched them. It is at such times of climatic stress that dogs occasionally become sick or half crazed with the heat, unless they are kept quiet and as cool as may be. Hence the superstition that rabies walks rampant during the so-called dog days. Almost never is it true rabies. Nearly always it is some malady or other due to exposure or over-exertion or wrong feeding, on the part of the humans in charge.

The only nugget of unimpeachable wisdom I have been able to glean from my lifetime of intensive dog study can be summed up on this one grim axiom: "Anything can happen!

Meanwhile I was teaching him, by patient training, the few needful things I wanted him to learn. Also I was giving him sweeping uphill gallops to deepen his chest and broaden his shoulders and establish his straightness of limb and complete bodily poise I sought for him. Incidentally, I was giving him two raw eggs and a pound of fresh raw beef a day, in addition to his regular kennel rations of bread and milk and bones, and I was grooming his blanket-like coat as one would groom a racehorse.

If the whole National Guard of New Jersey comes here, with a truckload of shooting-warrants, they aren't going to get Laddie. I promise you that. I don't quite know how we are going to prevent it. But we're going to. That's a pledge. So you're not to worry.

Here comes Laddie," she said. "Robert was looking all over for him when he dipped the other dogs. He came and asked me if——" "Trust Lad to know when dipping-day comes around!" laughed the Master. "Unless you or I happen to be on hand, he always gives the men the slip. He—

And, by the time Lady was brought back, cured, the puppy had begun to show the results of his sire's stern teachings. Indeed, Lady's absence was the best thing that could have befallen Wolf. For, otherwise, his training must needs have devolved upon the Mistress and the Master. And no mere humans could have done the job with such grimly gentle thoroughness as did Lad.

Being only a dog, Lad had no way of knowing his vanished deities ever would come back to him. Pitifully he followed the Mistress upstairs and down and everywhere she moved, as she prepared for the departure. He refused to be consoled when she patted him and when she said she and the Master would be back in a few days. His classic head drooped. His plumed tail hung disconsolate. He was the picture of utter misery.

It is all a gorgeous gamble, this breeding of pedigreed dogs. Therein lies its lure. When our prophecies come true, it is fun to boast. When they fail—which is oftener—silence is very golden indeed.

All of which went to confirm Lad in the natural belief that anything found on the road and brought to the Mistress would be looked on with joy and would earn him much gratitude. So,—as might a human in like circumstances,—he ceased to content himself with picking up trifles that chanced to be lying in his path, in the highway, and fell to searching for such flotsam and jetsam.

All my life I have made an intensive study of dogs. Thirty years ago I knew everything about them that could be known, and much more. After three decades of much closer study of them and their ways, I find to my dismay that I know almost nothing at all about them. I have scarcely scratched the surface. That is not false modesty. It is sickeningly true. The sum total of my canine knowledge and experience and observation is this: Anything can happen; and usually it does.

When Lad died, in September of 1918, I collected the ten or twelve yarns I had written about him, and I tried to sell the collection as a book under the name, Lad: A Dog. I was told that there had been no worthwhile dog books since Bob, Son Of Battle and The Call Of The Wild and that the public did not want that kind of fiction. There was no demand; there was no possible profit. Any volume with a canine hero was foredoomed to fall flat.

Something had to be done. Apart from robbing a bank—a line of endeavor for which I lacked the needful preliminary training—I saw no way to get ahead in the world except by forcing some kind of opening for myself as a fiction writer. Thenceforth, for several years, I set aside five hours a night, five nights a week, for this kind of work. After my nine-hour office day, I came home, got a shower and a rubdown; and as soon as dinner was ended, I went to my desk and began writing.

Daughter," said the grim old Presbyterian, "you can serve God and mankind as worthily with a gift like yours as you could by going as a missionary to the heathen. God gave you the rare power to write. You would be ungrateful to Him if you neglected it. Go on with your work.

We had reached the bathing pavilion. There I checked the bag, together with my watch and money, putting the two last-named articles in a big manila envelope and writing my name across the back. I received in exchange a numbered metal tag on a thick rubber band. I followed Bat Shayne's example of putting this band around my neck, feeling just a little like a licensed dog as I did so.

The dogs were kept in kennel buildings and in wire "runs" like so many pedigreed cattle—looked after by paid attendants, and trained to do nothing but to be the best-looking of their kind, and to win ribbons. Some of them did not know their owners by sight—having been reared wholly by hirelings. The body was everything; the heart, the mind, the namelessly delightful quality of the master-raised dog—these were nothing.

Darius Madden had more money than he needed and almost as much money as he wanted.

As Lad passed in through the doorway, he halted involuntarily in dismay. Dogs—dogs—DOGS! More than two thousand of them, from Great Dane to toy terrier, benched in row after row throughout the vast floor space of the Garden! Lad had never known there were so many dogs on earth.

But he was beginning to grow old. He slept more than had been his wont, and bit by bit his long daily runs were shortening. As with some fastidious elderly bachelor or spinster, the approach of age made Lad fussily averse to any disturbing change in the routine of his placid daily life. Strangers and guests were increasingly unwelcome to him.

It was a whim of hers. But Mrs. Madden was a woman of iron whim; and her husband had long ago learned to obey her

In those days, Lad was the only Sunnybank collie permitted in the dining-room. Whether the family was eating alone or with a roomful of guests, the great collie's place was always on the floor, close to the left of the Master's chair, during meals. This to the stumbling discomfort of the servants, in passing things; but as the servants idolized the dog, there was no complaint.

Ordinarily it would have been great fun for her to run up to this huge and gentle-looking collie and pat him. But the terrors of her parents' lecture were still fresh in her baby mind.

Deene had a refreshing ignorance concerning collies; and indeed of nineteen dog-breeds out of twenty. But he had an equally refreshing faith in himself to give wise decisions on any and all canine matters. So, obligingly, he consented to judge collies at Greenwold in addition to his beloved and ultra-tiny Chihuahuas. A similar thing has been done too often to call for comment.

Wolf most decidedly was not a show dog. Handsome and wise and fearless he was. But none of those things count in a dog show.

Nor did he smell any worse, even now, to these humans, than many humans had smelled to Lad's tormented senses, again and again, with their sickening perfumes and tobacco and booze! Lad had borne all that—though he loathed it—for the sake of being near those he loved. Yet when, through no desire of his own, he chanced to be malodorous, they ordered him from them in disgust!