Lad was getting along in years.
Not yet had age begun to claw at him; blearing the wondrous deep-set dark eyes and silvering the classic muzzle and broadening the shapely skull and stiffening the sweepingly free gait; dulling the sharp ears or doing any of the other pitiably tragic things that nature does to the dog who is progressing in his teens. Those, humiliations were still waiting for Lad, one by one; beyond the next Turn of the Road.
Yet the romp and the spirit of bubbling fun and the lavishly needless exercise--these were merging into sobriety. True, at rare times, with the Mistress or the Master--especially with the Mistress, Lad would forget he was middle-aged and dignified; and would play like a crazy puppy. But, for the most part he had begun to carry his years a trifle seriously.
He was not yet in the winter or even the Indian Summer of his beautiful life. But, at least, he had strolled into its early autumn.
And this, be it well remembered, is the curse which Stepmother Nature placed upon The Dog, when he elected to turn his back on his own kind, and to become the only one of the world's four-footed folk to serve Man of his own accord. To punish the Dog for this abnormality, Nature decreed that his life should begin to fail, almost as soon as it had reached the glory of its early prime.
A dog is not at his best, in mind or in body, until he has passed his third year. And, before he nears the ten-year mark, he has begun to decline. At twelve or thirteen, he is as decrepit as is the average human of seventy. And not one dog in a hundred can be expected to live to fourteen.
(Lad, by some miracle, was destined to endure past his own sixteenth birthday; a record seldom equaled among his race.)And so to our story:--
When the car and the loaded equipment-truck drew up at the door, that golden October day, Lad forgot his advancing years. In a moment, he was once more a puppy. For he knew what it all meant.
It did not need the advent of the Mistress and the Master from the house, in rough outing clothes, nor the piling of duffle-bags and the like into the car's tonneau, to send Laddie into a transport of trumpeting and gyrations. The first sight and sniff of the tents, rolled tight in the truck, had done that. Lad understood. Lad always understood.
This gear meant the annual fall camping trip in the back reaches of the Ramapo Mountains, some twenty-odd miles north of the Place; the fortnight of tent-life, of shooting, of fishing, of bracingly chill nights and white-misted dawns and of drowsily happy campfire evenings. It meant all manner of adventure and fun for Lad.
Now, on a fishing jaunt, the presence of any kind of dog is a liability; not an asset. A thousand dog-fancier fishermen can attest to that. And, when humans are hunting any sort of game, a collie is several degrees worse than worthless.
Thus, Lad's usefulness, as a member of the party, was likely to be negligible;--except in the matter of guarding camp and as an all-round pal for the two campers.
Yet, as on former years, there was no question of leaving him at home. Where the Mistress and the Master went, he went, too;whenever such a thing were possible. He was their chum. And they would have missed him as much as he would have missed them.
Which, of course, was an absurd way for two reasonably sane people to regard a mere dog. But, then, Lad was not a "mere" dog.
Thus it was that he took his place, by invitation, in the car's tonneau, amid a ruck of hand-luggage; as the camp-ward pilgrimage began. Ten miles farther on, the equipment truck halted to take aboard a guide named Barret, and his boy; and their professionally reliable old Irish setter.
This setter had a quality, not over-common with members of his grand breed; a trait which linked his career pathetically with that of a livery-plug. He would hunt for anybody. He went through his day's work, in stubble or undergrowth, with the sad conscientiousness of an elderly bookkeeper.
Away from the main road, and up a steadily rising byway that merged into an axle-snapping mountain-track, toiled the cars; at last coming to a wheezy and radiator-boiling halt at the foot of a rock-summit so steep that no vehicle could breast it. In a cup, at the summit of this mountain-top hillock, was the camp-site;its farther edge only a few yards above a little bass-populated spring-lake.
The luggage was hauled, gruntily, up the steep; and camp was pitched. Then car and truck departed for civilization. And the two weeks of wilderness life set in.
It was a wonderful time for old Lad. The remoteness and wild stillness of it all seemed to take him back, in a way, to the wolf-centuries of his ancestors. It had been monstrous pleasant to roam the peaceful forest back of the Place. But there was a genuine thrill in exploring these all-but manless woods; with their queer scents of wild things that seldom ventured close to the ordained haunts of men.
It was exciting, to wake at midnight, beside the smoldering campfire, and to hear, above the industrious snoring, of the guide and his boy, the stealthy forest noises; the pad-pad-pad of some wary prowler circling at long range the twinkling embers;the crash of a far-off buck; the lumbering of some bear down to the lake to drink. The almost moveless sharp air carried a myriad fascinating scents which human nostrils were too gross to register; but which were acutely plain and understandable to the great dog.
Best of all, in this outing, Lad's two deities, the Mistress and the Master, were never busy at desk or piano, or too much tangled up with the society of silly outsiders, to be his comrades and playmates. True, sometimes they hurt his supersensitive feelings most distressingly, by calling to him: "No, no, Laddie. Back!
Watch camp'" when he essayed to join them as they set forth with rods over their shoulders for a half-day's fishing; or as, armed with guns, they whistled up the bored but worthy setter for a shooting trip. But, for the most, Lad was close at their sides, during these two wonderful weeks. And he was very happy.
