Winter Run (17 page)

Charlie walked forward a stride. He knew what was going to happen, knew that when the covey rose up it would be like an explosion, that the beating of the wings would feel almost physical, knew that when it happened, he would be as surprised as if he hadn’t known the birds were there, even though he knew they were there. The dog didn’t move until the quail flew. But when they were gone and there was nothing for him to retrieve, the dog turned to the boy with a look of disappointment, as if the boy had let him down. The covey was never again in his little territory, so Uncle Dan didn’t point again that fall. He showed no interest in hunting for the birds.

• • •

Charlie was determined to hunt on his own. But fall was upon them and there was hunting with Luke and Sarah, so he didn’t pursue hunting with bird dogs until the following spring. In the meantime Uncle Dan seemed to have found the fountain of youth. Everyone agreed that he had blossomed. He gained weight and his coat became shiny. The idea was even put forward that he had grown back some of the hair on his tail. Certainly many of his scars had filled in, or at least Gretchen thought so. He was an amiable presence at the Corn House. He greeted everyone with dignity and became in his own way a landmark. But even in his newfound youth, he showed no inclination to hunt. On the rare occasion when he walked up on a covey, he was dynamite, but he deviated not one inch from his route in search of the quarry that he had been bred for generations to find.

Charlie’s idea was that he would go hunting on horseback—like the mounted foxhunters. Uncle Dan would be his pack. So one Saturday the following April, he saddled the pony and started up the hill behind the barn, calling Uncle Dan. The dog followed to the edge of the creek—the creek was a convenient place to get a drink on a warm day, so it was part of the old dog’s territory. From the other side Charlie called. The dog looked at him with his tail swinging slowly back and forth and his head held low. Charlie—or, more accurately, the pony—took a step. The boy looked back and called again. This time in a more commanding tone of voice.

“Uncle Dan, come behind.” He used this command because he had heard the huntsman say it to his pack when he was ready to move off somewhere. It had no visible effect on the dog except that he stopped wagging his tail. So there they were: Charlie on his side of the creek with the pony and Uncle Dan on the other, with the latter categorically refusing to move, no matter what tone of voice or actual words Charlie used. Uncle Dan’s look was downright quizzical, as if he couldn’t imagine what Charlie could possibly be asking of him. For Uncle Dan, Charlie’s side of the creek just didn’t exist.

“Then what did you do, Charlie?” asked Matthew in a serious tone. They were standing around in the store that evening. Everyone was smiling except Charlie.

“I went back across the creek and tried to chase him across the way the whips chase the hounds to the huntsman when he calls them.”

“Well?” Matthew asked, still in his serious tone. “What happened?”

Here Charlie again became aggravated just thinking about it. “That old dog is stubborn as a mule. All we did was go around and around in a circle like a cat chasing her tail and the pony getting mad and me, too. And that dog looking at me like he couldn’t imagine what I wanted him to do when I knew he knew perfectly well what I wanted him to do which was to follow me …” Charlie had to pause to catch his breath.

“But Charlie,” said Jimmy Price, the kid from whom they had bought the pony, “you need a hound
whip to make that old dog mind.” Jimmy was an all-around aficionado when it came to horses and hunting.

Matthew turned to him sharply. “What you talking about a hound whip, Jimmy. That wouldn’t do no good without a huntsman to chase the dog to …” He turned back to Charlie. “Anyway, if you going by yourself, you got to get the dog coming to you when you call. You need to see old man Jared Pugh. He’s a bird-dog man, he’ll know what to do.”

The following afternoon after Sunday lunch, Charlie walked down to Jared Pugh’s funny little house next to the depot. Charlie thought of it as a gingerbread house because Mr. Pugh had built it himself over a number of years from various mismatched bricks and cinder blocks that he picked up at sales. It started out a cinder-block house. Then Mr. Pugh started adding bricks of many colors. It was a strange, multi-colored cottage just below the train depot. Behind it in the tiny back yard were two pens where Mr. Pugh kept his two bird dogs. Unlike the hounds who lived together, the bird dogs were kept separately.

Jared Pugh managed the depot. In those days the mail still left on the train in the morning and evening and freight was loaded and unloaded. Water from the spring next to the Corn House came a mile through a two-inch metal pipe to the depot. In the old days the water had supplied the steam locomotives that stopped to top off the tanks before they went through the cut in Burdens Mountain to the valley and then
to West Virginia. The steam locomotives were long gone—there were diesel locomotives now. They lacked the comforting sound of the big drivers on the steam engines. When Charlie was eight his father had taken him to the depot and arranged to have him go aboard one of the huge, hissing locomotives while it was taking on water. The engineer had even let him ride in the cab the hundred yards from the water pipe to the depot building. Charlie’s father in his most solemn voice had made very clear to Charlie that he was witnessing the end of a chapter in American history. Charlie was wide-eyed when he described the heat and noise of the engine’s cab to Gretchen. He said that the floor plates were so hot you couldn’t have gone barefoot in there even in winter, and the fireman looked like a devil in a picture book what with all the grime and coal dust streaking his overalls and the heavy cloth cap almost covering his eyes stark white in contrast to the coal blackness.

Jared Pugh and Charlie’s father where waiting on the platform when the engine arrived at the end of the hundred-yard journey from the water pipe. Jared caught Charlie’s hands as he jumped and lowered him to the heavy creosote-soaked boards of the platform. The locomotive hissed itself back into movement and started westward to the long grade up the side of Burdens Mountain. It was not the last steam locomotive to stop at the depot for water, but it wasn’t far from the last one.

For once, Charlie was without words as he stood between the two adults and watched the train slowly move away. Just watching the huge wheels make the steel track move up and down was a little frightening.

“How much longer before they start hauling the mail on trucks, Jared?” asked Charlie’s father.

“Three, maybe four years, Mr. Lewis. I’m waiting for them to stop picking up freight any time now. Time’s coming when the trains through here won’t be hauling nothing but coal. Don’t need a depot for coal trains.”

Jared Pugh lived alone in his many-colored house with his two bird dogs. His wife had died years before from cancer and Jared, who had never been talkative, had gotten so quiet that except for the business of the depot he might not say ten words a day. He was a short, kind of pudgy man with thin red hair, big feet and long arms that hung out too far from his shirt sleeves and ended in large red hands that were amazingly precise for such an otherwise awkward sort of man.

Charlie was tentative about going to Mr. Pugh’s house that Saturday. It wasn’t that he was afraid of Jared, it was just that there had been little contact between the two—no thread to connect them, until now. Once Charlie got going it was fine. The thread was the bird dogs. Charlie explained his problem with Uncle Dan.

“He just won’t come with me at all, Mr. Pugh. No
matter what I do. I even tried some meat scraps to coax him, but he won’t cross that creek. That dog is just totally lazy. What can I do?” By this time Charlie had worked himself up into a state, and Jared Pugh, no matter how quiet he was, couldn’t help being amused at this blond boy all wound up about an old bird dog who wouldn’t cross a creek to go hunting.

“You need another dog, Charlie. Maybe that would make your old dog come along, when he seen another one going.” There was a long pause while Mr. Pugh looked first at the ground and then at Charlie as if making up his mind about something. Finally he looked up and said, so slowly that his mouth was actually open for a while before the words came out, “I need to go over to Mr. Winthrop’s to pick up a dog he’s giving me. I wasn’t going till next week but I reckon I could go now if you want to come along.” Here there was another long pause. “Just let me call over to his house to be sure he’s home. Be right back.”

Mr. Pugh emerged from his cottage in a few minutes, nodding his head yes. Charlie helped load the dog crate onto the pickup. The Winthrop’s were rich and their farm was called an estate. It was a ten-mile drive, and because Mr. Pugh drove nearly as slow as he talked there was plenty of time for Charlie to get the story on the dog they were going to pick up.

His name was Donald and that’s what everyone called him—Donald. Not Don or Donny, Donald. Donald was a champion field-trial English pointer. Mr. Winthrop had grown so fond of the dog that when
his field-trial days were over, Donald came to live in the house with the Winthrops. The problem arose when Mickey—an asthmatic, and therefore evil-tempered, sixty-pound English bulldog, who was also Mr. Winthop’s pride and joy and who also lived in the house—was introduced to Donald. Their hatred for one another was instant and implacable. After the first battle, it took the veterinarian close to an hour to sew the two of them back up. A plan was devised to introduce them to each other slowly but to no avail, and the second time the veterinarian had to sew them up, he suggested to Mr. Winthrop that this just wasn’t going to work. In this second battle Mickey had gotten one of his ears split absolutely in half and to every-one’s amusement, except Mr. Winthrop’s, appeared to have three ears.

Because of Jimmy Price, not all of this story was new to Charlie. Jimmy, who shod the Winthrop horses, said that he thought that Mickey and Mr. Winthrop looked alike at least until the advent of the third ear. Then Mickey became something bizarre beyond imagining. As an illustration of Mickey’s bad temper, Jimmy related the time Mr. Winthrop was driving his new Jeepster with the top down out the lane past the stable to get the paper with Mickey sitting majestically in the backseat. There were weeping willows hanging over the lane that had never been pruned and therefore hung down below the level of the windshield. As they passed under the trees, Mickey let out a growl of aggravation, reached up, and grabbed a mouthful of
the branches before they could whip across his face. And being a bulldog, he refused to let go. Mr. Winthrop glanced over his shoulder at the growl just in time to see Mickey snatched bodily from the Jeepster. Without another glance, Mr. Winthrop continued on his way, leaving Mickey’s huge bulldog body bobbing up and down in the air in complete defiance of gravity, still growling in aggravation. Jimmy swore the dog hung in the air for a full minute, but nobody believed him. Finally Mickey let go, dropped squarely onto the driveway, and didn’t move. On the way back Mr. Winthrop, who was nearly as jowly as Mickey, stopped the car and the two of them glared at each other. Finally Mr. Winthrop got out of the Jeepster, opened the passenger door, and beckoned to Mickey who grudgingly hopped back into the car because he was so lazy he wouldn’t walk across the lawn to the front porch when he could ride, even if his dignity had been hurt. As the dog jumped into the car, Jimmy distinctly heard Mr. Winthrop say, “Well, I hope you learned something from that, you hardheaded bastard.”

So it was easy to see why Donald really didn’t have a chance in that world. He had spent his life going about the business of bird-dog field trials and living in a kennel by himself. So after the second war had resulted in the third ear for Mickey, Mr. Winthop had the good sense to call Jared.

The two of them, Mickey and Mr. Winthrop, were waiting at the kennel door when Charlie and Jared drove up. Charlie said later that he took one look at
the bulldog and had to use all his manners and then some to keep from bursting out laughing. No story or description could have prepared him for what that dog looked like.

“Gretchen,” he said to his mother, “that is the absolutely ugliest dog on earth. It’s true what Jimmy said about him looking like he has three ears. And Mr. Winthrop and the bulldog do look alike, except for the three ears, of course …” At this point Charlie was overcome with laughter.

Gretchen tried to look stern. “You did mind your manners, didn’t you, Charlie?”

“Yes ma’am, but it was hard with that thing snuffling away and wagging his funny tail. He’s nice to people. He let me pat him. But his face is covered in slobber and those teeth stick out every which way … and Mr. Winthrop does talk through his nose just like the bulldog does.” Realizing what he had just said, Charlie was further overcome with laughter. Gretchen smiled. She liked to see her often solemn boy laugh.

Donald seemed perfectly happy to jump into the dog crate and when they arrived at the cottage back at the depot his tail was waving and if dogs can smile, he was smiling. Mr. Pugh had arranged his tiny kennel so there was a third run. He had turned a barrel on its side so Donald would have a place to get into out of the weather. The two other pointers barked a greeting to Donald who went happily to the barrel and crawled into the straw bedding and lay down facing
outward, at peace again with the world.

“Why does he like being in that little pen, Mr. Pugh? You’d think he’d hate being cooped up in that little space.”

“He’s ten year old, Charlie, and he’s spent most of those years either in a little pen or hunting. Maybe he thinks that now he’s in the pen he’ll go hunting again. I guess it’s all in what you’re used to. I’ll bring him up tomorrow afternoon and we’ll see how he gets along with your dog. After messing with that bulldog, I hope he ain’t gone sour on all dogs. God knows that bulldog don’t look any other dog in creation, so maybe he thought he was fighting an entirely different kind of animal.”

When Jared Pugh arrived the next afternoon, everyone was waiting. Charlie had Uncle Dan on a leash and his father and Gretchen were standing by in case of an emergency, although what the emergency might be was not at all clear. Mr. Pugh opened the crate door and clipped a lead on Donald’s collar who jumped to the ground his tail wagging.