THE FOX went in the ground more early than we might have wished, before the sun had hit the hazelbush. Dogs were called. (Some owners had to spread out far and wide, to get their hounds safe belted up again. As I have said, there were a lot of reds around.)
The other fox, picked up by Music Boss and handled by his crowd—it holed a good ten minutes earlier. My father cussed, and said no fox of modern times would give our dogs the hours which they used to give. I was old enough now to half agree with him.
A bugle came from Camden’s leather bag, the summons blew, and Little Bristles panted in as he was bound to do by virtue of inheritance, at least upon his mother’s side. But it was Benjy’s hand which leashed him up, and offered him in turn to Camden, and she looked her gratitude. Something rare and softening possessed those two by now, so I gave thanks. We saw it in their faces, though they never bandied words around.
Old Spring kept begging, “Let me look. Oh, let me see that dog!” They finally fetched up Little Bristles, burrs and muddy legs and slather, and people gathered near. Many would have laughed, except for recognizing a queer priestly glowing in the face of that old man.
He muttered, “Here’s the number painted on him. Seventeen.” It was done that way to help the judges. Spring touched the rugged coat, and said a word below his breath; he only raised his sight when Camden came.
“You know,” he asked her and the rest of ignorant humanity, “what you’ve got?”
Low sun glimmered on that scarf she wore, but not so much as on her hair. “I guess you wouldn’t call him—” she tried to chuckle, but a smile was all she made, and choking sounds—“quality. Except his voice. He’s one of the same litter, Mr. Davis. Two had the bugle voice; I lost the other with pneumonia. So I trained him. Little Bristles.”
Springfield Davis said, “That night.” He spoke as if no other persons lived around; yet he knew that they were there, for his weak glance went skirmishing among the throng, and finding Benjy bright-eyed, way over on the end. “Come here,” he said, and Benjy came.
“That night, when I walked over to your place, you told me of this scrub a-hanging close to Little Lady. Said he was a vagabond. I tried to see him, but it was nigh on to black-dark by that time. Well, Benjy. Camden.” Still paying no attention to the rest of us, though we were lapping every word, and puzzled half to death.
“You see,” he said, “I thought they were extinct. All bred and gone, and dead and gone. You called him Bristles? That’s what he was. A Whitlock Shaggy. A product of as fine a stock as ever ran.”
We gaped and pushed and stared, listening, and wishing for extra ears that we might hear the better. Uncle Punch Lancey elbowed a pathway through the crowd, and stood and nodded with importance at every word Spring said, as if he’d known this weighty fact and miracle right from the start.
Long ago, said Springfield Davis. Oh, maybe when he himself was a boy. A man named Alf Whitlock, far over in Kentucky—he sharpened up a breed of hounds from Maryland. All shaggy-coated and glasseyed—not pretty, but possessed of force and staying stuff. They grew out of some old Irish strain; and some of them had hair like manes to hide their collars. And, said Spring Davis, they were the fathers of the Goodman hounds, and even showed up in ancient records of the Walkers.
Some of them were brought on, farther west, and some were even running down in Arkansas—long, long ago, when he was young, Spring said. He’d seen them work like demons, and they had a voice to brag about.
But they were all absorbed or petered out, and scarcely any but the oldest hunters could know a Whitlock when they saw one—which they didn’t nowadays. Younger folks would never even recognize the name.
So that was Bristles, bred self-determinedly to Little Lady; and Little Bristles was the pick of both. And where that tattered father of his came from, we could never guess. Perhaps a car upset somewhere and let him out. Perhaps someone had sold him, and he was carried far away, and then was trying doglike to go home, the day he wandered in.
It resembled fairy tales of yore (and yet as solid and flavorable a chunk of truth as you could bite): the servant boy in rags, the worn wanderer scorned at castle gates—and all the time he was a king in his own right, if folks had only known. His beggarly trappings were but a disguise to hide the royalty. And—like in those old legends—a man who saw through patches and stains might then kneel down to worship.
Oh, a poor hound-dog could never own a castle, or have a pile of chests filled up with jewels and crowns and scepters, or blow the secret signal-whistle tied beneath his shirt, and thus fetch up an army of retainers with their lances and their loyalty. But he could possess a thing which might be pondered on as better still: a line of ancestors who’d done their feats, and all as staunch as knights who went to gallop in the Crusades.
Not then did Springfield Davis tell us all, nor did he know it all. The name of “Whitlock Shaggies” would be chewed and respected through many Butternuts; and other elder neighbors could write to breeders in Kentucky, and ask them what they knew about the Shaggies. So yarns would glisten with an extra polish when answers came from people who remembered.
Old Paddy’s Shack—they’d tell of him. A Whitlock, bred right in the bone: and how he jumped a fox an hour after sundown, and drove that fox just like he owned it, up until he put one leg within a rail fence notch. Driving so hard, and hitting sudden in the dark, he snapped that bone as if it were a stick of stovewood. He howled and struggled till his owner came to rescue him and pry him out.
Then Paddy’s Shack tore loose from all restraint, and on three legs, and dragging that one limb he’d busted, he used fox-sense and ears instead of nose to meet the fox again. He went like mad and crooked lightning through the brush. He found the pack, and clung upon their rear, giving full voice and never quitting till the fox had gone to earth.
They found him then; and it was afternoon, and twenty miles away, or so the story goes. I reckon that his toes were sore enough on those three legs he’d trod upon. But on the leg he drug—
No claws, no toes, no pads. Just raw and ugly flesh and stump, not fit to touch or even look at. His owner must have bathed the bleeding stub with tears before he did his doctoring.
And Paddy’s Shack, he was a mighty stud, hobbling on three legs around the farm from that day forth. But people couldn’t bear to watch him when the sound of other hounds in cry went billowing among the hills. They’d try to stop their ears against the mourning which he made. And when he died they carved his name and likeness on a stone.
It could have been, we all considered, lineage like that from which old Bristles sprang. Fresh from thickets and the willows he’d traced his keen unerring path, and found a pen wherein the horn-mouthed marvel of our region waited him. Maybe if there is a brown god of wilderness and hunters, him it was who set the gate ajar, beyond the tiniest manipulation of Camden Davis. It was something to be decided in timber where the foxes ran.