A Boy and His Dog Pup

The puppy was a sort of scroungy, scruffy little runt—mostly black on his back with a white belly and some brownish yellow around his ruff and his eyes.  Someone had told me that clabbered milk was good for pups and we had plenty of that.  I raised that little runt on clabbered milk and table scraps.  It must have been good for him because he grew at a prodigious rate.  By the time he was six months old that runt had turned into a big-bonded, medium sized, deep-chested dog.

One evening my father asked me what I was going to name the dog.  Up until then we had simply been calling him “the pup”, but my father said that a dog should have a proper name.  I thought about it for a long time but could not come up with anything that seemed appropriate so, by default, the dog’s name remained simply “Pup.”

I never did manage to train Pup to bring in the cows by himself like some dogs will do.  Pup was more what you would call a “biscuit hound.”  He would hang around outside the kitchen door at mealtime (neither cats nor dogs were ever allowed into the house) hoping someone would throw him a biscuit—which I usually did.  He was my constant companion, though, and turned out to be one of the best squirrel dogs I ever saw.

When I went squirrel hunting with that slim little Remington twenty-two, Pup always went along.  He seemed to know just what to do.  He never barked and simply padded along silently at my side or behind me through the thick woods until we spotted a squirrel in a tree.  Of course, as silently as we moved, the squirrel always saw us and would promptly move around to the other side of the trunk or limb.

I did not have to signal or direct Pup in any way.  He would see the squirrel as soon as I did—probably before.  When I halted and froze in position, Pup would silently circle around the tree until he could see the squirrel again, then he would go “Whuff!”  just once.  The squirrel would circle away from Pup and I would have a clean shot at it.  Ol’ Pup and I put a lot of meant on the table that way.

Pup did have one real failing—he really loved to chase the cottontail rabbits.  We might be crossing a pasture to go squirrel hunting and, if a rabbit got up, Pup was off and away.  I do not recall that he ever caught one but he would be gone for several minutes, then finally show up and throw himself at my feet, panting and looking very pleased with himself.

Chasing rabbits almost got Pup killed one time—y me.  I had the rifle and, although they were not as a young squirrel, would not hesitate to kill a rabbit to take home.  Well, we jumped this cottontail in a wide pasture and Pup took off after him.  The rabbit circled and was running crosswise to me so I had a clear shot.  I pulled down on the rabbit just when Pup was close on his tail.

I did not lead the rabbit enough and he shot out of the sight over the hill before I could reload, but old Pup let out a pained yelp and skidded to an abrupt halt.  He pawed at his nose then came trotting back and sat down looking reproachfully at me.  His muzzle was bleeding.  Turned out the bullet had just grazed the end of his nose.  He did not chase anymore rabbits that day.  I think he was trying to figure out if it was my fault or if that rabbit had kicked him in the snoot.  He must have decided that it was me because in a day or two he was back chasing rabbits.

Spit and Whittle Clubs were common in the south and Midwest.

The loafers at Grandpa’s store used to kid me about Pup just being a “biscuit hound” and not much good as a cattle dog or to chase a fox.  Pup was with me one hot summer afternoon when I went by there and there were three or four of them loafing in the shade on the store porch.  One of the loafers was white-haired old Buck Blair who lived in a shack just down the road and would mosey up there in the afternoons to get a bucket of water from the well at the churchyard.

Someone started ribbing me about Pup as usual and old Buck decided to put them down.  “Why, fellows,” he said, “that there is one of the smartest dogs I ever did see.”

They did not stop whittling and Cook Neil never missed a lick at his chewing tobacco but they all looked at Buck to see what was coming next.  I sort of wondered myself.

“Well, sir,” Buck went on, “I took Conrad fishing the other day and that there dog went along.  We went down to Maze Creek and when we got there, just to see what that pup would do, I threw a quarter into a deep hole in the creek.  That there dog went down and dived in right after it.”

Buck paused and struck a match to light his old pipe.  The whittlers stopping making shavings for a minute and everyone waited for Buck to go on.  I did, too, because I knew I had not been fishing with Buck Blair and I also knew he probably hardly ever had a quarter in the pocket of his patched overalls to go throwing into a creek.

“Well,” he said solemnly, “that pup dived deep and he was down there so long that I was beginning to wonder if he had gone and drown hisself.”

Another pause (Buck had the timing of a great comedian) then, with a twinkle in his faded old blue eyes, he said, “Nossir—after a couple of minutes that there dog popped back up and he had a string of catfish in his mouth and fifteen cents in change!”

They all laughed and went back to whittling while Cook Neil spat a big squirt of tobacco juice into the dust of the road.  I was tickled pink and took Buck’s galvanized water pail and drew him a bucket of water from the well to take home.  I used that tale of his about Pup several times years later.

Amusements in the Ozarks during the Great Depression

Conrad and Richard going fishing

Youngsters today would be at a loss to amuse themselves without their cellphones, computers, and televisions.  Several years ago some of the first reality programing on television was done by PBS, Frontier House in 2002.  The premise was to place a few families in the “wilderness” where they would have to live like pioneers. I hate reality programing, but watching these families come undone was fascinating.  It certainly showed the disconnect between our roots and our now.  The 1930s Ozarks were not that far from the pioneers.

Our amusements were naive and simple but I do not recall that us kids ever lacked for something interesting to do.  We never heard of Little League and, back in those country hills, there were no Boy Scout Troops.  Richard and I did have a tattered copy of the Boy Scout Manual that we learned a lot of useful things from, but mostly all we lacked was enough time to do all the things we would like to do.  I do not remember ever being bored.

During the hot summer a principal activity was to go to the creek, do some fishing, and have a swim.  There were no game wardens in the hills until later years and our tackle was very simple.  We had seen pictures of rods and reels in the Sears Roebuck wish book but no one had one.  Instead, for a quarter at Grandpa’s store we could buy a complete fishing line.  It was ten or twelve feet of green line, a small sinker, a long-shank hook just right for small catfish and perch, and a cork bobber.  Such a “store bought” fishing line came wound on a little wood frame that fitted very snugly in a back pocket of those bib overalls.

Bait for the little catfish and sunperch in Maze Creek was no problem.  We often dug big worms from the rotting manure pile behind the barn.  An ideal bait can to carry them in was either a Sir Walter Raleigh or Prince Albert empty flat tobacco tin.  That, too, fitted snugly in a back pocket.

If we had not taken time to dig worms or did not find some right away, we could always catch some grasshoppers in the pasture on Bertha Beck’s farm on our way to the creek.  A perfect receptacle for those was that button pocket on the bib of our overalls.  Of course sometime we forgot and left some in there later which did not make Mother very happy when our overalls showed up in the laundry.

Neither was a fishing pole a problem.  Along the creek bank there was lots of underbrush from which we could cut a fairly straight pol seven or eight feet long.  Willow made a good fishin’ pole and there were others that were nice and limber, too.  We always cut a fresh pole each time because a dry pole gets brittle and might break just when you had a big one on.  That was never a problem because in small Maze Creek a “big” catfish might be seven inches long and most of the sunperch were smaller than your hand.  We kept everything we caught even if they were hardly bigger than a pumpkin see.

We would put the fish we caught on a stringer (a switch cut from a bush) and keep them fresh in the water, then carry them proudly home and spend maybe an hour tediously cleaning them.  My mother would roll them in yellow cornmeal and fry them in a black iron skillet.  Some of them hardly made two bites, but they were delicious.

A more major source of meat for the family table, especially in early summer when the young were almost grown, was squirrels and rabbits.  About the time we moved into that little house south of Bona, when I was about eleven and Richard thirteen, Dad bough a little Remington 22-caliber squirrel rifle.  It was a dandy—a slim little single-shot rifle with a rolling block breech and a barrel about thirty-two inches long.  When we used long rifle shells (we used shorts for practice because they were cheaper) that little rifle was remarkably accurate up to forty or fifty years, which was about as far as you could see the eye of a squirrel.

Richard and I both quickly became very proficient with that little rifle.  One of our target practice competitions was to stick a row of kitchen matches in the bark of a down long, then, from fifteen or twenty yards, see who could light the most matches without knocking them out of the log.  The trick was to shoot so that the bullet just missed the head of the match, but came close enough that the air friction would ignite the phosphorous on the tip of the match.

When hunting rabbits with that little twenty-two, we did not feel bad when we hit on in the body.  After all, a rabbit can run pretty fast and it takes a pretty good shot to hit him anywhere on the run.  We never considered using a shotgun for either rabbits or squirrels for three reasons: One, it was not sporting, two the scattered shot spoils some of the meat, and three, we were not allowed to carry Dad’s single-shot 12-guage shotgun until we were older.  Apparently Dad felt that shotguns were too dangerous for youngsters.  If we had accidentally shot ourselves in the foot with the twenty-two it would only make a small hole but a shotgun was potential disaster.

It goes without saying that most parents aren’t going to hand their child a 22 rifle and tell them to go amuse themselves.  And of course, my grandfather had taught his boys how to handle a gun safely. The gun wasn’t a toy, although honing their shooting skills would soon come in handy in preserving my dad’s and uncle’s lives, as it did for some many of the greatest generation.  It also put food on the table.