James Herriot's Dog Stories Read online

  His wife laughed and opened the door and as we stepped out into the silent scented night she gripped my arm and looked up at me roguishly.

  ‘I suppose this is your young lady,’ she said.

  I put my arm round Helen’s shoulders.

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly, ‘this is my young lady.’

  That night marked the birth not only of Susie’s new family but of my whole married life, because up till then everything had gone wrong in my courtship of Helen. From that time on my course was set for the most important of all things, and as I look back over nearly forty-five years of our life together I am thankful for the happy fate which worked for me at the Daffodil Ball. It is good, too, to be reminded of the very personal way in which we dealt with our patients in those days – sitting in a cottage throughout a whelping. This is a romantic story and technical things seem to be of no great matter, but I must just mention that we very rarely use whelping forceps now.

  13. Jock

  I had only to sit up in bed to look right across Darrowby to the hills beyond.

  I got up and walked to the window. It was going to be a fine morning and the early sun glanced over the weathered reds and greys of the jumbled roofs, some of them sagging under their burden of ancient tiles, and brightened the tufts of green where trees pushed upwards from the gardens among the bristle of chimney pots. And behind everything the calm bulk of the fells.

  It was my good fortune that this was the first thing I saw every morning; after Helen, of course, which was better still.

  Following our unorthodox tuberculin-testing honeymoon we had set up our first home on the top of Skeldale House. Siegfried, my boss up to my wedding and now my partner, had offered us free use of these empty rooms on the third storey and we had gratefully accepted; and though it was a makeshift arrangement there was an airy charm, an exhilaration in our high perch that many would have envied.

  The front room was our bed-sitter and though it was not luxuriously furnished it did have an excellent bed, a carpet, a handsome side table which had belonged to Helen’s mother and two armchairs. It had an ancient wardrobe, too, but the lock didn’t work and the only way we kept the door closed was by jamming one of my socks in it. The toe always dangled outside but it never seemed of any importance.

  I went out and across a few feet of landing to our kitchen-dining-room at the back. This apartment was definitely spartan. I clumped over bare boards to a bench we had rigged against the wall by the window. This held a gas ring and our crockery and cutlery. I seized a tall jug and began my long descent to the main kitchen downstairs because one minor snag was that there was no water at the top of the house. Down two flights to the three rooms on the first storey, then down two more and a final gallop along the passage to the big stone-flagged kitchen at the end.

  I filled the jug and returned to our eyrie two steps at a time, I wouldn’t like to do this now whenever I needed water, but at that time I didn’t find it the least inconvenience.

  Helen soon had the kettle boiling and we drank our first cup of tea by the window looking down on the long garden. From up here we had an aerial view of the unkempt lawns, the fruit trees, the wistaria climbing the weathered brick towards our window, and the high walls with their old stone copings stretching away to the cobbled yard under the elms. Every day I went up and down that path to the garage in the yard but it looked so different from above.

  ‘Wait a minute, Helen,’ I said. ‘Let me sit on that chair.’

  She had laid the breakfast on the bench where we ate and this was where the difficulty arose. Because it was a tall bench and our recently acquired high stool fitted it but our chair didn’t.

  ‘No, I’m all right, Jim, really I am.’ She smiled at me reassuringly from her absurd position, almost at eye-level with her plate.

  ‘You can’t be all right,’ I retorted. ‘Your chin’s nearly in among your cornflakes. Please let me sit there.’

  She patted the seat of the stool. ‘Come on, stop arguing. Sit down and have your breakfast.’

  This, I felt, just wouldn’t do. I tried a different tack.

  ‘Helen!’ I said severely. ‘Get off that chair!’

  ‘No!’ she replied without looking at me, her lips pushed forward in a characteristic pout which I always found enchanting but which also meant she wasn’t kidding.

  I was at a loss. I toyed with the idea of pulling her off the chair, but she was a big girl. We had had a previous physical try-out when a minor disagreement had escalated into a wrestling match and though I thoroughly enjoyed the contest and actually won in the end, I had been surprised by her sheer strength. At this time in the morning I didn’t feel up to it. I sat on the stool.

  After breakfast Helen began to boil water for the washing-up, the next stage in our routine. Meanwhile I went downstairs, collected my gear, including suture material for a foal which had cut its leg, and went out the side door into the garden. Just about opposite the rockery I turned and looked up at our window. It was open at the bottom and an arm emerged holding a dishcloth. I waved and the dishcloth waved back furiously. It was the start to every day.

  And, driving from the yard, it seemed a good start. In fact everything was good. The raucous cawing of the rooks in the elms above as I closed the double doors, the clean fragrance of the air which greeted me every morning, and the challenge and interest of my job.

  The injured foal was at Robert Corner’s farm and I hadn’t been there long before I spotted Jock, his sheepdog. And I began to watch the dog because behind a vet’s daily chore of treating his patients there is always the fascinating kaleidoscope of animal personality and Jock was an interesting case.

  A lot of farm dogs are partial to a little light relief from their work. They like to play and one of their favourite games is chasing cars off the premises. Often I drove off with a hairy form galloping alongside, and the dog would usually give a final defiant bark after a few hundred yards to speed me on my way. But Jock was different.

  He was really dedicated. Car chasing to him was a deadly serious art which he practised daily without a trace of levity. Corner’s farm was at the end of a long track, twisting for nearly a mile between its stone walls down through the gently sloping fields to the road below, and Jock didn’t consider he had done his job properly until he had escorted his chosen vehicle right to the very foot. So his hobby was an exacting one.

  I watched him now as I finished stitching the foal’s leg and began to tie on a bandage. He was slinking about the buildings, a skinny little creature who, without his mass of black and white hair, would have been an almost invisible mite, and he was playing out a transparent charade of pretending he was taking no notice of me – wasn’t the least bit interested in my presence, in fact. But his furtive glances in the direction of the stable, his repeated criss-crossing of my line of vision gave him away. He was waiting for his big moment.

  When I was putting on my shoes and throwing my Wellingtons into the boot I saw him again. Or rather part of him; just a long nose and one eye protruding from beneath a broken door. It wasn’t till I had started the engine and begun to move off that he finally declared himself, stealing out from his hiding place, body low, tail trailing, eyes fixed intently on the car’s front wheels, and as I gathered speed and headed down the track he broke into an effortless lope.

  I had been through this before and was always afraid he might run in front of me, so I put my foot down and began to hurtle downhill. This was where Jock came into his own. I often wondered how he’d fare against a racing Greyhound because by golly he could run. That sparse frame housed a perfect physical machine and the slender limbs reached and flew again and again, devouring the stony ground beneath, keeping up with the speeding car with joyful ease.

  There was a sharp bend about half-way down and here Jock invariably sailed over the wall and streaked across the turf, a little dark blur against the green, and having craftily cut off the corner he reappeared like a missile zooming over the grey stones lo