Free Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune

attention—so much that Lad was miserably lonely. The great collie would try with pathetic eagerness, a dozen times a day, to lure his mate into a woodland ramble or into a romp on the lawn, but Lady met his wistful advances with absorbed indifference or with a snarl. Indeed when Lad ventured overnear the fuzzy baby, he was warned off by a querulous growl from the mother or by a slash of her shiny white teeth.
    Lad could not at all understand it. He felt no particular interest—only a mild and disapproving curiosity—in the shapeless little whimpering ball of fur that nestled so helplessly against his beloved mate’s side. He could not understand the mother love that kept Lady with Wolf all day and all night. It was an impulse that meant nothing to Lad.
    After a week or two of fruitless effort to win back Lady’s interest, Lad coldly and wretchedly gave up the attempt. He took long solicary walks by himself in the forest, retired for hours at a time to sad brooding in his favorite “cave” under the living-room piano, and tried to console himself by spending all the rest of his day in the company of the Mistress and the Master. And he came thoroughly to disapprove of Wolf. Recognizing the baby intruder as the cause of Lady’s estrangement from himself, he held aloof from the puppy.
    The latter was beginning to emerge from his newborn shapelessness. His coat’s texture was changing from fuzz to silk. Its color was turning from gray into yellow. His blunt little nose was lengthening and growing thin and pointed. His butterball body was elongating, and his huge feet and legs were beginning to shape up. He looked more like a dog now, and less like an animated muff. Also within Wolf’s youthful heart awoke the devil of mischief, the keen urge of play. He found Lady a pleasant enough playfellow up to a certain point. But a painfully sharp pinch from her teeth or a reproving and breath-taking slap from one of her forepaws was likely to break up every game that she thought had gone far enough, when Wolf’s clownish roughness at length got on her hair-trigger nerves.
    So, in search of an additional playmate, the frolicsome puppy turned to Lad, only to find that Lad would not play with him at all. Lad made it very, very clear to everyone—except to the fool puppy himself—that he had no desire to romp or to associate in any way with this creature which had ousted him from Lady’s heart! Being cursed with a soul too big and gentle to let him harm anything so helpless as Wolf, he did not snap or growl, as did Lady, when the puppy teased. He merely walked away in hurt dignity.
    Wolf had a positive genius for tormenting Lad. The huge collie, for instance, would be snoozing away a hot hour on the veranda or under the wistaria vines. Down upon him, from nowhere in particular, would pounce Wolf.
    The puppy would seize his sleeping father by the ear, and drive his sharp little milk teeth fiercely into the flesh. Then he would brace himself and pull backward, possibly with the idea of dragging Lad along the ground.
    Lad would wake in pain, would rise in dignified unhappiness to his feet and start to walk off—the puppy still hanging to his ear. As Wolf was a collie and not a bulldog, he would lose his grip as his fat little body left the ground. Then, at a clumsy gallop, he would pursue Lad, throwing himself against his father’s forelegs and nipping the slender ankles. All this was torture to Lad, and dire mortification too—especially if humans chanced to witness the scene. Yet never did he retaliate; he simply got out of the way.
    Lad, nowadays, used to leave half his dinner uneaten, and he took to moping in a way that is not good for dog or man. For the moping had in it no ill-temper—nothing but heartache at his mate’s desertion, and a weary distaste for the puppy’s annoying antics. It was bad enough for Wolf to have supplanted him in Lady’s affection,