The Dog Who Came to Stay: A Memoir by Borland Hal

Author:Borland, Hal [Borland, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781453237960
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

SPRING IN NEW ENGLAND is seldom much to boast about. Robert Frost summed it up when, speaking of an April day, he said that if the sun is out “you’re one month on in the middle of May,” but if a cloud comes along “you’re two months back in the middle of March.” Fall is our season up here, often extending from Labor Day clear through to Christmas. We sometimes say that we earn that superlative fall by enduring the punishment of spring. One raw April day I asked Fred, at the hardware store in the village, if we weren’t going to have any spring. “Oh, it’ll be here,” Fred said. “It’s a little late this year. Usually it falls on a Monday, but this year it won’t be till a Tuesday. Leap year.”

So, the year I am speaking of, we endured April. Pat brought in the first woodchuck, and the next day it snowed. Charley spread the load of manure on the garden, and it was two weeks before he could get in with the plow. I tried to fork up a row for Barbara to plant peas, and I found frost still in the ground four inches down. She planted them anyway, and somehow they sprouted. I painted the boat and slid it over a scum of ice at the river’s edge to launch it.

Then it was May, and the next thing we knew the temperature was in the eighties and the pear tree was showing white and the apple trees were all pink and green. The ducks were quacking on the river, Barbara saw four bluebirds and we had our first mess of milkweed greens. Albert began planting field corn.

Pat’s visits down the road, at Albert’s place, lengthened from an hour or so to most of the morning. Then I heard him running the lower slope of the mountain, not back of the house but down the valley, back of the lower pasture. I asked Albert if he knew what was going on. He said he wasn’t sure, but Pat was coming down there every morning, getting Suzy, and going off somewhere. Yes, he had heard Pat on the mountainside. And yes, it was fawn season. He didn’t know whether Pat was running deer or not, or if Suzy was running with him.

I went down there to watch. Sure enough, Pat and Suzy were running the mountainside together. But only the lower slopes, and apparently they were running rabbits. Suzy, slim and young, ran like a deer, but she ran without a sound. It looked to me as though she were just running with Pat, and Pat was doing all the trailing. But it still bothered me. I remembered what Dave, the dog warden, had said, that one dog alone seldom will run deer but that two of them together might.

I mentioned it to Charley. Charley said, “No. Pat doesn’t run deer. Last winter, up after rabbits, I jumped a deer and I tried to put Pat on the track, just to see.

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