Bobbie Busted
Day After Thanksgiving,
1923
 This was on a street in Des Moines. Hesitant, his head
swung west, then east. He moved eastward. The old lost uncertain feeling
enraged him. A yellow mongrel fled by him, eastward; a rare and prized
Irish wolfhound, tawny and lithe, flashed past. Other dogs were running.
Bobbie looked back. A car, with a wired cage built on it, stood at the
curb. Men were chasing, coaxing, seizing dogs. A man approached Bobbie.
The cage was crammed with dogs. Into the midst of them Bobbie was
hurled. Infuriated, he leaped - and his leap took him against the door
before its latch could fall. A clubbed net struck him as he sprawled on
the pavement, a blow heavy enough to bring a snarl of anger and of deadly
warning from his throat. He was driven eastward, where more men waited.
But he did not flee; he backed, at bay. A madness shook him. And in the
hot fury of it, as the men edged closer and debated whether he were mad or
not, the voice leaped forth from his long-stirring instinct, the answer he
had demanded came.
He was at bay, snarling, facing west in the street where men and boys
had gathered at a discreet distance. The opposed him. They drove him east.
All this strange world, so far from home, had opposed him, fought and
driven him and kept him away from home. He knew this. He did not know west
as west: he knew it, in this moment, abruptly and clearly as home. And the
barrier of men and boys west of him parted as he charged, a fanged
thunderbolt, through it. Incredibly, running low and hard, he was out of
sight - out of town . . . and he continued to fly westward, in the open
country, where the first light snow lay, his feet beating a rat-tat on the
pavement.
He knew, now; his nose pointed like a weather vane into the west. The
wind whispered warnings of great mountains, of slinking beasts, of
torrential floods; but his nose now was a compass, pointed homeward, true
and unswerving.
His first week of this homing was a delirious madness. In six days from
Des Moines he reached Denver, and the vast plains were behind him.
(From "Bobbie, A Great Collie" by Charles Alexander, 1926)
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