CHAPTER XXV
A REGULAR DOG
WIGGLEDY loved nothing better than to go snow-shoeing with the Ranger’s children.
Of course the fat pup was helpless in the deep snow, but he would go plunging into their snow-shoe tracks, leaping from one to another with the most joyous barking and wriggling and flapping of ears.
Sometimes he caught up with them. Then he would try to steal a ride on the back of a snow-shoe, till they discovered why it was so hard to lift that foot.
After awhile they taught him to help them bring in the firewood. Giving him just one small stick at a time to take between his jaws, they had him trotting ahead of them, every trip they made.
Later they made him a harness andtaught him to drag their light sled over the snow crust, though he would have to grow a lot before he could bring in wood that way. To both the children and the pup it was all just fun. They wouldn’t have enjoyed it a bit if they had had to do it.
“I do believe that pup’s going to pan out a regular dog,” the Ranger decided. “I tell you what, it takes these mongrels for just plain, ordinary brains,—not the kind that bird dogs have, nor fighting dogs, nor any special kind, but just plain all-’round brains.”
“And heart,” added his wife softly, watching the children romping with Wiggledy on the hearth rug. “I’ll feel now, if anything happened to the children when they’re out snow-shoeing, he’ll come and tell me, or die fighting for them.”
“I hadn’t noticed that he was particularly scrappy.”
“Ho, ho! You haven’t seen him chasing Clickety-Clack. I wonder how he’ll hit it off with the little bear.”
“That we shall see when spring comes.”
Now Ring-tail had formed the habit ofsleeping on the children’s bed. When Wiggledy first came, he was so tiny and so lonesome that he, too, was taken under cover. About this time the excitement began.
When the two animals were kept on opposite sides of the bed, there was peace. But let Wiggledy come too near and Ring-tail promptly boxed his ears. Then he would yelp and scuttle closer to the children. And sometimes they were awakened by a regular cat and dog fight,—in which the pup, being the youngest, generally got the worst of it.
If the pup were banished, he howled forlornly till they took him back to the warmth of their beds and hearts. Finally it came to be understood between them that Wiggledy was to sleep down at the foot, under a fold of blanket, while Ring-tail took the head, where the feather-bed billowed out above the children’s heads, and where she could come and go without disturbing any one,—for she was still a prowler of the night.
If the children overslept and Wiggledygot hungry, he would simply pull the covers off them.
The question was what would happen when Fuzzy-Wuzz came back.