Wolf

Albert Payson Terhune

Description

Terhune penned many books about the dogs he kept and trained on the Sunnybank estate throughout the 1920s and 30s.
Wolf, is Terhune's classic story of the funny-looking purebred collie who was somewhat an outsider with a matching personality. Wolf the dog himself became famous posthumously when his heroic death was recorded in nearly every paper in America.
This early work by Albert Payson Terhune was originally published in 1925, we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography.

Sujets

• Classics
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781473393196
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WOLF
By
Albert Payson Terhune
Author of BUFF: A COLLIE, FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LAD, TREVE, A DOG NAMED CHIPS, etc.

This book, while produced under wartime conditions, in full compliance with government regulations for the conservation of paper and other essential materials, is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED
Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Albert Payson Terhune
Albert Payson Terhune was born on 21 st December 1872, in New Jersey, United States. Terhune s father was the Reverend Edward Payson Terhune and his mother, Mary Virginia Hawes, was a writer of household management books and pre-Civil War novels under the name Marion Harland. He was one of six children, having four sisters and one brother, but only two of his sisters survived until adulthood. Further tragedy beset the family when his own wife, Lorraine Bryson Terhune, died four days after giving birth to their only child. He later remarried Anice Terhune, but had no more children.
Terhune received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1893. The following year, he took a job as a reporter at the New York newspaper The Evening World , a position he held for the next twenty years. During this period, he began to publish works of fiction, such as Dr. Dale: A Story Without A Moral (1900), The New Mayor (1907), Caleb Conover, Railroader (1907), and The Fighter (1909). However, it was his short stories about his collie Lad, published in Red Book, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Hartford Courant , and the Atlantic Monthly , that brought him mainstream success. A dozen of these tales were collected in to novel form and released as Lad: A Dog in 1919. This was a best-seller and in 1962 was adapted into a feature film. He went on to produce over thirty novels focussing on the lives of dogs and enjoyed much success in the genre.
Terhune s interest in canines was by no means restricted to fiction. He became a celebrated dog-breeder, specialising in rough collies, lines of which still exist in the breed today. Sunnybank kennels were the most famous collie kennels in the United States and the estate is now open to the public and known as Terhune Memorial Park. Terhune died on 18 th February 1942 and was buried at the Pompton Reformed Church in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.
My Book is Dedicated To the Memory of WOLF A GALLANT LITTLE COLLIE AND MY CHUM
CONTENTS
I:
HIS OFF-DAY
II:
HIS FRIENDS
III:
TRAPPED
IV:
THE KIDNAPERS
V:
PORTIA AND A BONE
VI:
THE MYSTERY-SHOW
VII:
THE LAST ADVENTURE
CHAPTER I: HIS OFF-DAY

WOLF
CHAPTER I: HIS OFF-DAY
IT was not Wolf s day. Few days were Wolf s days. Wolf had an inborn gift for ill-luck. Trouble was his birthright. There are such dogs; even as there are such people.
More than once the fiery red-gold collie had the wit and the grit to make Trouble his servant, rather than his tyrant. But not on this day.
There is a fire-blue little lake in the North Jersey hinterland; with soft green hills that encircle it as though they loved it. On its eastern shore, facing the sunset across the water, a point of sloping land runs out;-a point that is a hillside lawn, girdled by gnarled and mighty oak trees, more than two hundred years old.
On a plateau framed in giant oaks, above the Point, is an old rambling vine-clad gray stucco house, red-roofed and trimmed with black-brown timbers. Behind the house and behind the barns which lie in a hollow a hundred yards from it, the oak-grove hillside rises gently again, for a furlong, with the driveway winding through it; until it ends in the stone wall that borders the highroad. Beyond the wall and the road stretch anew the meadows and the woodlands of The Place, with the mountain forests behind them.
Here, with the Mistress and the Master whose chum he was, dwelt Sunnybank Lad; glorious mahogany-and-snow collie, whose eyes had a Soul back of them.
Here Lad lived out his sixteen years of staunch hero-life and of d Artagnan-like adventure. Here he died, in the fullness of serene old age. Here he sleeps, near the house he loved and guarded.
Some of you have read the tales of Lad s exploits. You may remember his temperamental gold-and-white mate, Lady; and Bruce, the beautiful giant collie without flaw of nature or of physique.
If so you will also recall Wolf, the stormy little son of Lad and Lady. (More of you will remember reading, a year or so ago, in the newspapers, the account of Wolf s hero-death. For nearly every paper in America devoted much space to this shining climax of his tumultuous life.)
Lad went through his eventful long career, serene and loved; his dashing adventures bringing him vast credit and admiration. Bruce the Beautiful lived out a serene tenure of days; petted, praised, happy.
Even Rex, the big crossbreed at the lodge-gate, seldom got into serious trouble;-at least seldom until a blizzard day you may have read of-a day when his murder-battle with old Laddie in the snow-choked forests behind The Place found its ending in a knife-thrust through his insane heart.
With Wolf, in his early years, it was different. He was born to Trouble. And he ran true to form.
Within him throbbed the loyal, staunch, uncannily wise nature of his mighty sire, Lad. But through his veins, too, frisked the temperamental wildness of his mother, Lady.
The two strains did not blend. They warred. Bit by bit, the Lad strain predominated; but only after several years had passed.
For instance, it was the heritage of Laddie s unafraid and chivalrous soul which at the last made Wolf throw his life away gayly and gloriously to save a worthless cur.
But in his early years, the mixture of Lad and Lady in his makeup was as incongruous as the clash of flint and steel. The result often took the form of one hundred per cent bad luck for the strange young dog.
Wolf s ill fortune began when his fuzzily pudgy grayish-yellow puppy body shaped up into something approaching maturity and when the indeterminate fuzz merged into a ruddy gold coat. Collie puppies, up to four months, are adorably pudgy and fluffy and appealing. That is why even the poorest of them find ready purchasers at that stage.
Not until the roundness of body and indeterminate shape of head and foreface set into their permanent lines can the most expert beholder tell with certainty what the young collie is going to develop into.
It was so with Wolf. His sire and dam, each in a wholly different way, were glorious specimens of the highest type of thoroughbred. Their son, Wolf, was as highborn as they. His was the heritage of collie perfection. But he missed this heritage by a mile.
The Mistress and the Master watched with increasing gloom their hopes of a son of Lad and Lady which should combine the best points of both parents. They had bragged happily of breeding a collie that should be a pride to The Place; at dog-shows and at home.
Wolf was not such a collie.
He was undersized; though wirily powerful and as lithe as a panther. His coat, which should have been wavily abundant, was as short and as thick as a chow s. It was not unlike a chow s in texture and growth. His bushy tail was three inches too short. His head was broad where it should have been chiseled into classic lines. His muzzle was not long enough for the rest of his head. The stop above it was too prominent. His glowing dark eyes were round; not almond-shaped or slanted as called for in the Standard of the Breed.
In brief, he was not a true type of collie; though of royally pure lineage. He was a throwback;-a throwback almost to the ancestral wolves which form the trunk and roots of the collie family-tree. It was this queer outward resemblance to a young timber-wolf which gave him his name.
Yet Wolf was beautiful, in his own odd way; and he was surpassingly strong and swift. That broad brain-space of his was vibrant with incipient wisdom.
The fact remained that he was anything but a show-type of collie and that he gave no sign of reflecting future credit on The Place or on his breeders. He would have been sold, in those early days, except that nobody would pay a decent price for such a dog, and because the Mistress-the natural protector of all The Place s weak and luckless Little People-pitied him.
From the first, he gave to the Mistress the absolute loyal devotion which had always been given her by Lad. This devotion did not keep Wolf, in puppyhood, from transgressing The Place s every law and winning for himself a repute for sheer naughtiness which strained all the Mistress s gentle patience.
Yes, he was a trouble-center; seemingly a changeling in disposition and in luck; as well as in body. His elfin cleverness served only to intensify this; and it blurred the traits of steadfastness he had inherited from Lad.
From the beginning, as I have said, he was the adoring, if erratic, slave of the Mistress. He loved the Master, too, in only a lesser degree. For the rest of mankind or womankind he had not the slightest use; to the day of his death. He endured them when he must; and he kept out of their way when he could. He molested no one, so long as people let him alone. But he resented with slashing teeth any effort at familiarity from the world at large. Children were the sole exceptions. Like the Mistress and like Lad, he had an odd sense of protection for anything defenseless.
Yet, there was one of The Place s Little People which Wolf failed to recognize at first glance as belonging to the helpless class. Thereby hangs this story.
It began on a day when a well-meaning friend sent the Mistress a pale-gold canary in an equally pale-gold cage. The Place was a bird-sanctuary. Never a year when at least a score of nests were not built among the heavy wistaria vines that dr