|
 Thurber's mother with a smaller one of his 54 dogs.
|
Extract from 'The dog
that bit people'
Probably no man should have as many dogs in his
life as I have had, but there was more pleasure in them for me except in the
case of an Airedale named Muggs. He
gave me more trouble than all the other 54 or 55 put together. . . |
Muggs never bit anyone more than once at a
time. Mother always mentioned that as an argument in his favour; she said he
had a quick temper but that he didn't hold a grudge. She was forever defending
him. I think she liked him because he wasn't well. 'He's not strong,' she would
say, pityingly, but that was inaccurate; he may not have been well but he was
terribly strong.
One time my mother went to the
Chittenden Hotel to call on a woman mental healer who was lecturing in Columbus
on the subject of 'Harmonious Vibrations.' She wanted to find out if it was
possible to get harmonious vibrations into a dog. 'He's a large tan. coloured
Airedale,' Mother explained. The woman said she had never treated a dog, but
she advised my mother to hold the thought that he did not bite and would not
bite. Mother was holding the thought the very next morning when Muggs got the
ice-man, but she blamed that slip-up on the ice-man. 'If you didn't
think
he would bite you, he wouldn't,' Mother told him. He stomped out of the house
in a terrible jangle of vibrations.
One morning when Muggs bit me
slightly, more or less in passing, I reached down and grabbed his short stumpy
tail and hoisted him into the air. It was a foolhardy thing to do and the last
time I saw my mother, about six months ago, she said she didn't know what
possessed me. I don't either, except that I was pretty mad. As long as I held
the dog off the floor by his tail he couldn't get at me, but he twisted and
jerked so, snarling all the time, that I realized I couldn't hold him that way
very long. I carried him to the kitchen and flung him onto the floor and shut
the door on him just as he crashed against it. But I forgot about the back
stairs. Muggs went up the back stairs and down the front stairs and had me cornered in the
living-room. I managed to get up onto the mantelpiece above the fireplace, but
it gave way and came down with a tremendous crash, throwing a large marble
clock, several vases, and myself heavily to the floor. Muggs was so alarmed by
the racket that when I picked myself up he had disappeared. We couldn't find
him anywhere, although we whistled and shouted, until old Mrs. Detweiler called
after dinner that night. Muggs had bitten her once, in the leg, and she came
into the living-room only after we assured her that Muggs had run away. She had
just seated herself when, with a great growling and scratching of claws, Muggs
emerged from under a davenport where he had been quietly hiding all the time,
and bit her again. Mother examined the bite and put arnica on it and told Mrs.
Detweiler that it was only a bruise. 'He just bumped you,' she said. But Mrs.
Detweiler left the house in a nasty state of mind. .
Lots of people reported our Airedale
to the police, but my father held a municipal office at the time and was on
friendly terms with the police. Even so, the cops had been out a couple of
times -once when Muggs bit Mrs. Rufus Sturtevant and again when he bit
Lieutenant-Governor Malloy - but Mother told them that it hadn't been Muggs'
fault but the fault of the people who were bitten. 'When he starts for them,
they scream,' she explained, 'and that excites him.' The cops suggested that it
might be a good idea to tie the dog up, but Mother said that it mortified him
to be tied up and that he wouldn't eat when he was tied up.
Muggs at his meals was an unusual
sight. Because of the fact that if you reached towards the floor he would bite
you, we usually put his food plate on top of the old kitchen table with a bench
alongside the table. Muggs would stand on the bench and eat. I remember that my
mother's Uncle Horatio, who boasted that he was the third man up Missionary
Ridge, was sputteringly indignant when he found out that we fed the dog on a
table because we were afraid to put his plate on the floor. He said he wasn't
afraid of any dog that ever lived and that he would put the dog's plate on the
floor if we would give it to him. Robert said that if Uncle Horatio had fed
Muggs on the ground just before the battle he would
have been the first man up Missionary Ridge . . . |
