Born to Bark Read Free Page B

difficult to read for a child, and some books on the open shelves contain inappropriate material for someone his age.”
    “You can test his reading skills right now if you like, and I will give you or anyone else on the library staff the right to prevent him from taking out books with unsuitable material in them.”
    The librarian hesitated, then leaned down and asked me, “So, you like dogs?”
    I nodded. She pulled over her desk chair, motioned for me to sit down, and walked away. A few moments later she reappeared carrying a book with the title
Bruce
and a picture of acollie on the cover. It was a novel by Albert Payson Terhune, a writer who had died a few years before and was best known for his fictional adventures of collies, the breed that he truly loved. She opened the book to the first chapter and randomly pointed at a paragraph and said, “Start reading here. Out loud, please.”
    It was like reading to Skipper, which I had done so many times before. I adopted my best oratorical voice and began.
    “Her ‘pedigree name’ was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie—daintily fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat. Her ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke’s Peerage
.
    “If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and with a shade less width of brain-space she might have been cherished and coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in time might even have won immortality by the title of ‘CHAMPION Rothsay Lass.’
    “But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her earliest ancestors, the wolves …”
    I was caught up in the story virtually from the moment that I began and went on reading with my attention glued to the page in front of me. I had no idea what my mother and the librarian were doing until the librarian tapped me on the shoulder and said, “That’s okay for now. We need you to sign your name right here on your library card.”
    That tan-colored card was my key to rest of the library collection. The library did not have a big collection of books on dogs even in the main area, but there was a book on puppies and another on general dog care, which I checked out along with the Albert Payson Terhune novel that had served as my reading test. Over the next year or so I would ultimately read every dog book that Terhune had ever written. Like the dogs in the books by Eric Knight, who wrote about Lassie, Terhune’s dogs were intelligent, empathetic, and courageous, but they were not “cartoon” dogs that could talk. Likereal dogs they reasonedand acted in response to circumstances. Because of those books my dreams were often filled with beautiful collies, and my ambitions included not only understanding more about dogs, but perhaps someday writing about dogs.

    I read the book on puppies and the book on dog care several times. Meanwhile, I checked each morning and on my return from school each day to see if there was another dog in the world that “God wanted me to have” who might have arrived when I was asleep or away from home.

C HAPTER 2
TIPPY

    Around a month after Skipper died, my father arrived home carrying something wrapped in a blue terry-cloth bath towel. I followed him the length of the short hallway and into the kitchen where he sat down. Puzzled, curious, and hopeful, I tried to see what he had brought me. He placed the bundle in my arms and leaned over to say, “Give him a name. Give him a life.”
    My father smiled in a way that made his gray eyes twinkle. I collapsed into a cross-legged heap on the floor and was staring into the dark eyes of a puppy in the bundle that I held. He would grow up to be a classic smooth fox terrier; his face was dark, long, and tapered almost to a point. His ears were typical of his breed and would grow to be erect, with only the top hanging down to make the V-shaped flap that dog breeders call “button ears.” As an adult he would weigh around 17 pounds and would stand around 15 inches at the