Collie -- Juvenile fiction; Dogs -- Juvenile fiction; Short stories
Normally, the solution to this would have been to let him go hungry
until he was ready to eat. But a valuable show-and-stud collie cannot be
allowed to become a skeleton and lifeless for lack of food, any more
than a winning race-horse can be permitted to starve away his strength
and speed.
Treve’s daily pound-and-a-half of broiled chuck steak was cut in small
pieces and set before him on a plate. Then began the eternal task of
making him eat it. Did we turn our backs on him for a single minute—the
food had vanished when next we looked.
But it had not vanished down Treve’s dainty throat. Casual search
revealed every missing morsel of meat shoved neatly out of sight under
the edges of the plate or else hidden in the grass or under nearby
boards or handfuls of straw.
This daily meal was a game. Treve enjoyed it immensely. Not being
blessed with patience, I abhorred it. So Robert Friend took the duty of
feeding him. At sound of Robert’s distant knife, whetted to cut up the
meat, Treve would come flying to the hammock where I sat writing. At a
bound he was in my lap, all fours and all fur—the entire sixty pounds of
him—and with his head thrust under one of the hammock cushions.
Thence, at Robert’s call, and at my own exhortation, he would come forth
with mincing reluctance and approach the tempting dish of broiled steak.
Looking coldly upon the food, he would lie down. To all of Robert’s
allurements to eat, the dog turned a deaf ear. Once in a blue moon, he
consented to swallow the steak, piece by piece, if Robert would feed it
to him by hand. Oftener it was necessary to call on Wolf to act as
stimulant to appetite.
"Then I’ll give it to Wolf,“ Robert would threaten. ”_Wolf!_"
Treve got to his feet with head lowered and teeth bared. Robert called
Wolf, who came lazily to play his part in the daily game for a guerdon
of one piece of the meat.
Six feet away from the dish, Wolf paused. But his work was done.
Growling, barking, roaring, Treve attacked the dish; snatching up and
bolting one morsel of meat at a time. Between every two bites he
bellowed threats and insults at the placidly watching Wolf,—Wolf who
could thrash his weight in tigers and who, after Lad and Bruce died, was
the acknowledged king of all the Place’s dogs.
In this way, mouthful by mouthful and with an accompaniment of raging
noise that could be heard across the lake, Treve disposed of his dinner.
Yes, it was a silly thing to humour him in the game. But there was no
other method of making him eat the food on which depended his continued
show-form and his dynamite vitality. When it came to giving him his two
raw eggs a day, there was nothing to that but forcible feeding. In solid
cash prizes and in fees, Treve paid back, by many hundred per cent., the
high cost of his food.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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