An occasional writer's journal

The first book I read as a child growing up in Nottinghamshire was not of the tales of Robin Hood, as you might imagine, but of a land of real adventure that seemed as far away as Mars.

I remember my sadness as I neared the end of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, the heartwarming tribute by Canadian author and naturalist Farley Mowat to his beloved mongrel Mutt, knowing that the story was drawing to a close but feeling a sense of achievement on having read my first full length book.

I must have pored over those final pages as slowly as possible, prolonging the inevitable, dreading that the next flick of my muddy thumb would bring not another pages of glorious entertainment, but a blank endpaper. On rediscovering the book this month after it had spent more than three decades in my parents’ attic, I realised my first encounter with autobiography had probably been the best ever.

Farley Mowat, now in his 80s, is an active environmentalist

Farley, who was born in 1921, had grown up with Mutt on the Canadian prairies, a place I could barely imagine. I had trees of my own to climb, and streams to explore, but it is ironic that a dog was perhaps the one thing missing from my own childhood.

Even now the story of Mutt evokes so many memories, not only of childhood but of every time I have returned to some state of innocence, particularly in the presence of animals. It is an example of the great responsibility that weighs on the writer of children’s literature, in complementing the childhood experience without introducing any more of the adult world than is necessary.

My copy of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be was a present from my older cousin who had explored Canada as a student at the end of the 1960s and probably thought the book would encourage a love of reading. That’s not exactly what happened, as I have never became an avid reader, and my interest in journalism stems from influences closer to home.

It took me years to feel comfortable with a book in my hand although I do recall the same cousin trying to entice me on other birthdays with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I would say that his aim had already been achieved, for without realising at the time, I’d been deeply affected by Farley’s story when I was at my most receptive.

Anybody who has loved and lost a dog will identify immediately with the novel, which pulls no punches in its description of the passing of one’s first love. . . and of childhood itself.

“A rabbit passed and the morning breeze carried its scent. Mutt’s trail veered off abruptly, careering recklessly across the soft yielding furrows of October’s plow, slipping and sliding in the frost-slimed troughs. I followed more sedately until the tracks halted abruptly against a bramble patch. He had not stopped in time. The thorns still held a tuft or two of his proud plumes.

And then there must have been a new scent on the wind. His tracks moved off in a straight line toward the country road, and the farms which lie beyond it. There was a new mood in him, the ultimate spring mood, I knew it. I even knew the name of the little collie bitch who lived in the first farm. I wished him luck.

I returned directly to the road, and my boots were sucking in the mud when a truck came howling along toward me, and passed in a shower of muddy water. I glanced angrily after it, for the driver had almost hit me in his blind rush. As I watched, it swerved sharply to make the bend in the road and vanished from my view. I heard a sudden shrilling of brakes, then the roar of an accelerating motor — and it was gone.

I did not know that, in its passing, it had made an end to the best years that I had lived.

In the evening of that day I drove out along the road in company with a silent farmer who had come to fetch me. We stopped beyond the bend, and found him in the roadside ditch. The tracks that I had followed ended here, nor would they ever lead my heart again.

It rained that night and by the next dawn even the track were gone, save by the cedar swamp where a few little puddles dried quickly in the rising sun. There was nothing else, save that from a tangle of rustling brambles some tufts of fine white hair shredded quietly away in the early breeze and drifted down to lie among the leaves.

The pact of timelessness between the two of us was ended, and I went from him into the darkening tunnel of the years.”

From The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957) by Farley Mowat. Read Bill Lueders’ excellent article about Farley for The Daily Page.