He was the runt of the litter. His mother didn’t want him, and his siblings did their best to crowd him out. But to me, the nondescript Heinz was the pick of the litter. As soon as I saw him I knew I had found the pup I had been looking for. And picking a name was easy: He was SCRUFFY. No other name would have suited him.

When I brought Scruffy home a month later he was no bigger than a guinea pig. Skipper, our Malamute, immediately took it upon himself to be his father, mother, trainer, and protector. In the protector line his job began the minute I set the pup onto the kitchen floor. Shadow, one of our three mother cats, a huge gray short-hair--a stray--made a giant lunge toward him, ready for the kill. With one leap Skipper landed between Shadow and the pup, warding off bared claws. And I knew that I no longer had to worry about protecting Scruffy from the cats, the geese, the ducks, the chickens, the turkeys, or the children. He had Skipper.

A mongrel he may have been, a runt, but Scruffy was no moron. In the trick department he could roll over, speak, jump through a hoop, say his prayers, or do any number of other tricks, including retrieving any article I would suggest, no matter how many things I had lined up. He never made a mistake.

Scruffy wore his personality in his tail. His was straggly and far too long for the rest of him. At first I had wondered about having it docked. But as the time went on I was glad I had decided to let him keep it. It wasn’t long until we had learned to read Scruffy’s tail like one would read a compass, or possibly a road map. He had a different tail-wag for every part of his life, from waving it uncertainly when he met a stranger, to almost wagging his whole hind end off whenever he greeted a friend, or a member of the family. But we found out the hard way of the special kind of wag he had when he spotted an animal of nature.

We had barely gotten out of our boat and scrambled up the bank to our summer lake cottage when Scruffy, then ten months old, bounded off into the woods, his tail swinging like a flag in a hurricane. Thinking that possibly he had heard some squirrels--for which he had some strange obsession--we thought little of it, busying ourselves helping our children, who ranged in age from four to fourteen, in setting up their tent. They had been looking forward to this special treat ever since their summer holidays had begun, three weeks earlier.

The last tent peg had just been put in place when our ears were blasted with a yelp, and at the same time, our noses were inundated with the unmistakable fumes of a skunk. All eleven of us--and Skipper--headed in the direction of the yelp. At the edge of the woods stood one little brown dog, his tail between his legs, and one little black-and white polecat, her tail up in the air. They stood facing each other. Before mama skunk had time to appear on the scene, my husband snatched Scruffy by the scruff of his neck, and holding the wreaking dog at arm’s length, made a mad dash for the lake.

“Run for the lake,” he yelled to the children.

At the same time, I ran into the cabin to see what we had in the line of tomato juice, not knowing--nor at this point, caring--whether or not the tomato juice antidote theory was fact or fiction. By the time I arrived at the dock with a family-size can of tomato soup (the only thing in the tomato line, in the cupboard), the rest of the family was in the water, clothes and all; and my husband was frantically scrubbing Scruffy with sand and dunking him in the lake.

“If this doesn’t work,” he said, “we’ll have no choice but to pack up and go home.

All eyes were riveted on the procedure as my husband and I took turns smearing tomato soup over the poor puppy, and dunking him time and time again under the water. The next procedure was to take a bar of Sunlight soap to him, scrubbing and rinsing him again and again.

A soggy group of kids climbed out of the water, and without being told, built a beach fire. Had we had time to look, our hearts would have almost broken at the sight of the six dejected looking boys and three sad-faced girls who sat huddled around that campfire. Even Skipper, his head resting on his big paws, stared with mournful brown eyes into the fire. No one spoke. Possibly each was praying that the long-looked-for vacation wouldn’t be spoiled. If so, it worked. An hour later a scruffy little doggy came bounding into the group. The smell was gone. His ordeal was forgotten. The vacation was redeemed.

It was early in December, when Scruffy was just past four years old, that his obsession for animals of nature landed him into serious trouble. Since we lived in the country, and had no close neighbors, I hadn’t seen the necessity of correcting him for his folly of barking at things he saw in the woods. It was squirrels to which he was particularly attracted. He and the squirrels played a sort of game. The squirrels would scamper down the trunk of a tree, chattering and scolding while they snatched a pinecone; then they’d scurry up again, laughing at him when they reached the top. And Scruffy would bark. And bark. And bark. Then the squirrels would skitter off to another tree. Scruffy would follow, taking him deeper into the woods with each tree change. This game would go on hour after hour until around supper time, when an exhausted Scruffy would amble back to the house, his tail swinging, his tongue hanging out of the corner of his mouth. And the next day he and the squirrels would play their game all over again.

But on this particular day, when Mother Nature had thrown her first blanket of snow over the landscape, Scruffy didn’t come home. I called him until I was hoarse. By bedtime he still hadn’t shown up. The following morning, after a night of sleeplessness, I took Skipper, and we went into the woods, looking for him. I knew the tracks we were following must be Scruffy’s, by Skipper’s actions. And then I saw them, two sets of tracks, one being much bigger than the other. My heart froze. Dropping to my knees, I took a closer look, scanning the area for further signs. It was then I noticed that the smaller set of tracks--Scruffy’s--had suddenly ended.

Skipper’s frenzied barking and running around in circles, confirmed my suspicions. Cougar! “Oh no! Please let it not be; please let it not be.”

But Scruffy never returned to us. We like to imagine that his spirit is still out there somewhere, barking,

Helen Dowd

This is a true story that took place in the early 60's