Penny by Borland Hal;

Author:Borland, Hal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

Nine

The next day Penny left the cows strictly alone. We stayed at home and watched her, just to see what she did. She was a model dog, came when called, ate her food, didn’t chase cows and went to bed without protest. The same the next day, and the next.

Barbara said, “She’s settling down, at last.”

And when this exemplary behavior continued for a week I said, “Well, life may be dull around here, but it’s worth living again.”

“After what we’ve been through with that dog,” Barbara said, “I could do with weeks and weeks of this kind of dullness.”

Penny was on her best behavior right through the second week, ebullient, lively, but starting no uproars. Maybe, I thought, she had finally got all that out of her system. Barbara and I both began to relax.

Looking back later, we wondered why we were surprised that it didn’t last. Some dogs, like some people, simply can’t abide a quiet life. Life isn’t life for them unless things are happening. Maybe they have a heightened sense of drama and adventure. Maybe they actually need dragons at every turn in the road. Penny had her dragons out there in the pasture at five o’clock in the afternoon, for a few days. Then they stopped being dragons and were just plain cows. But there had to be other dragons somewhere.

It started like another normal, quiet day. Penny was her gay, happy self when I let her out of her house, frolicking and romping in the dewy grass, dashing to the back door to be let in, eating her breakfast with gusto, then going outdoors for fifteen minutes. She came back in, greeted Barbara, came up to my study with me and napped for an hour, then went down to lie on the front steps and watch the morning. All routine. Before lunch we would go for a walk, all three of us, and maybe Penny would chase a rabbit.

I was at work at my desk when a highway truck came up the road about nine-thirty. The town highway department was going to sweep our secondary blacktop road, prepare it for a coat of road oil. The highway crew is a group of men we know, men who patch the chuckholes in the spring, mow the roadsides in the summer, plow the snow in the winter. Friends. They knew us. They knew Penny, at least by sight.

The truck came up the road, and I heard Penny bark. Then a frenzy of barking. Then men’s laughter.

I went downstairs, and there Penny was, out in the road, disputing the way with that big red highway truck. The driver had stopped, not wanting to run her down, and he and the two other men with him were trying to talk her into reason, laughing loudly all the while. Penny would back away, they would start the truck, and she would dart in front of it again and they would stop.

I went out, gave sharp orders, finally caught Penny by the collar and hauled her aside so the truck could go on up the road.

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