For Andrew On His Birthday (Karazan Music Of The Night)

A Note To Andrew (An Ode To Jack)



Sometimes I look for traits in you
Of a great big dog you never knew.......
A dog that loved me all his days
And understood in special ways.
But that's not fair to you, Andrew;
You're not a substitute; but yourself!
You've eased the loss, soothed the pain
And tugged my laughter home again.
Yet, "Puppy", at times I almost start
When your eyes recall him to my heart
You'll never lack for love, it's clear
Because of him, you're twice as dear....


Happy Birthday in Heaven, baby boy. Give kisses to Jack & Satchie.

"Is Thy Servant A Dog"

(By Fullerton L. Waldo - 1919)

"This is a true tale of the simple heroism of a dog who saved the lives of ninety-two people when the mail-boat Ethie went to smash on the reefs off Martin Point, Newfoundland, December 10,1919. A week later, the newspapers of this country had the bare fact of the deed, sent out by my friend A.L. Barrett, Associated Press correspondent and editor of 'The Western Star' at Curling, on the west coast. 'The Western Star' is the only newspaper on the entire coast, and it has a circulation of 750, weather permitting.

I came home from Labrador by the Ethie in September. She crawled up and down between Curling on the Humber, and Battle Harbor, on the Labrador, where Dr. Grenfell's hospital is planted, nosing her way into every bight and cove and tickle and harbor and bay where there was any chance of dropping a barrel of oil or picking up a kental (112 pounds) of salt cod. Going north was bad enough, but coming back was worse. The boat was so heavily laden that the deck outside the musty cabins was about thirty inches from the sea when it was calm. I had one thirty-sixth of the tiny dining-saloon; and for two nights out of four, spent buffeting a long-shore, sleep was quite unthinkable. War travel in Europe was the acme of comfort compared with it. For at every place we stopped, though at midnight in a darkness thick as gravy, the whole of a tiny hamlet swarmed aboard and held its owl-home week and Parliament in one. The babies were invariably brought, and the teething ones seemed chosen to stay with us, and 'spell each other in relays of lamentation, hardly to be told sometimes from the crying of the wind. There was no wireless; and when I met the boat, she crawled out of a fog where she was hidden for four days, and where an iceberg, towering so high that the top disappeared in a mist, had all but done for her. In trying to make the channel to the dock at Flower's Cove, she struck the rock on four different voyages last summer. But not through the fault of the captain, and not because he was reading Dickens in his bunk. I never saw officers and crew more faithful. They never seemed to sleep, and the pursuer was to be found at all hours of the night down in the hold, while the steam winch clacked and clattered, checking off the badly labeled, ill-assorted cargo as it was hauled aloft and lowered aboard the flocking power-boats. An anxious business was it for the consignee if a package went astray. Dr. Grenfell waited two years for a searchlight to come from his friend Dr. Daly, the geologist of Harvard; and remedies vitally wanted for patients might fail to arrive.

The lower deck was crammed with oil and fish and machinery and hay and flour - the hay worth eighty dollars a ton at least, and the flour twenty-four dollars a barrel. Cattle came and went, protesting - small horses with wild eyes and pitiable cows and calves: but none got to the farthest north, for the dogs would eat them there, and Uncle Phil Coates is the wonder of all Avalon Peninsula because he keeps four pigs.

Is the preamble too long? One must get the picture of the sloppy boat, swollen with its cargo and passengers, to know what the dog did of whom were are presently to hear.

The Ethie on December 10 was laboring back to Curling for perhaps the last trip of the season. She was off Martin Point, between Cow Head and Bonne Bay, when 'a mighty wind arising,' with icicles for its teeth, drove her on to the rocks. This is the district of Sainte Barbe, the patroness of thunder-storms, and though thunder-storms themselves are rare, the gales and the ice and the rage of the sea are harder on a little ship. The Ethie, forth years from her cradle on the Clyde, a tub of iron sheathing, never meant for this ding-dong service in the ice-fields of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, rebelled against her two wheelmen clinging for dear life to the spokes in the raving storm, and plunged slam-bang on the reef, where the black dragon-spines of rock run out from the Point. Logy of herself, and superladen with all that the fishermen could stow aboard, there was no hope for her life from the moment that she struck upon the rocks, and a mighty shudder thrilled her frame and filled her passengers with fear.

For they remembered the Florizel, and how the sea washed off the people one by one from the upper works of the wrecked vessel; they remembered the fate of the 150 sealers lost with the Southern Cross; they remembered a hundred wrecks, the winter's tale of all the coast.

And this is where the dog comes in.

It was not possible to launch the boats. I know those boats well, for they were about the only sitting-room that I could find in my September journey. They were like museum specimens - archaic as the Indian relics at St. John's, their ropes and covers fairly falling to pieces, their biscuit mediaeval, and their water foul. One of the boats was workable - I went ashore for mail at Cow Head, ten miles from the Point where the wreck took place.

None of the crew dared to attempt the swim through the freezing waters. The sailor who can swim is almost as rare in Newfoundland as the great auk or the Newfoundland wolf, which are extinct. So the effort was made to shoot a line ashore, but the line fell far short and caught in a snarl upon a tooth of a rock.

Then they put over the dog. I do not know his name, but I have sent to Newfoundland to get it, for some Philadelphia people want to give him a collar, engraved. Evidently this animal was on the way from the Labrador to draw the winder mail-sledge over the trail from Bonne Bay to the railway at Deer Lake.

So they threw this noble beast into the sea; then they shouted to him words of command; and with a sagacity that would be preternatural in any other sort of dog, he swam to the rock where the rope was caught, and wrestled with the tangle till he worked it loose; and then with the free end gripped in his teeth, he struggled for the shore.

If you have ever been in that black, frigid water (as I have), you will understand the monumental feat of that grand little swimmer! From the ship and from the shore they could see him; and they cheered him as he rose on the crest of a white, tearing wave, and sank again in the scooping hollow of it, holding to the rope, though the weight of it all but pulled him down and drowned him as the freezing salt water sluiced into his jaws. Can you not imagine that little, straining, eager head, and in his eyes the light of half-despair and half a hope, that no man saw, though God in Heaven must have known and taken pity. Have you thrilled to the run of Masefield's 'Reynard the Fox'? This dog's short swim of several hundred feet was a finer thing - for the lives of ninety-two were hanging by that rope and by the thin-spun thread of a dog's life.

It had been a life of hardship and abuse - of all-too-common kicks and blows, and hiding under the bottom-boards of houses, living on scraps and cabbage-leaves and the cod-heads, til the snow came whirling and the sledges must be drawn. But on this reeking boat there were hands and voices that had been kind to him; and now he was saving them all, and he must have known it.

When - exhausted, trembling, all but frozen - he staggered, rope in mouth, out of the last billow to the pointed cobbles of the beach, there were willing hands of men to take the rope from him, and they rigged up a tackle with a boat-swain's chair betwixt the ship and the shore, and so ninety-one adults were drawn from the doomed vessel to the safety of the land. The ninety-second was a baby, eighteen months old, and the baby traveled in a mail bag, 'pleasantly sleeping and unaware.'

And the dog? Let us hope he does not have to cut the pads of his feet on the icy mail-route over the trail from Bonne Bay to Deer Lake this winter! Let us hope that after the life of fighting with the other dogs for the crumbs that fell from the master's table, he now sleeps well beside a roaring fire of hackmatack logs, among those who love and fondle him, well-fed and snoring, dreaming - his nose twitching as he dreams - of his great adventure!"

An Ideal

From "The Twentieth Century Dog (Non-Sporting) - Compiled From The Contributions Of Over Five Hundred Experts," Volume 1, Herbert Compton (1904):

"Miss E. Goodall's Ideal Newfoundland - Royal in mien, gentle in manners, docile yet full of dignity, true as steel and faithful unto death, my ideal Newfoundland dog looks as noble as the work for which he was born - the work of rescue. When the Creator endowed him with that sublime instinct which leads him without training or direction, but out of his own consciousness, to save life at sea or in perilous waters, He bestowed on the dog an attribute that makes it not merely the king of dogs, but first in the animal kingdom. Not only to save his master is his understood duty, - there are many gallant hounds who are competent to understand that call upon their intelligence - but to succour the stranger in danger, and to carry from the shore, through surf and breakers and angry waves, assistance to wrecked vessels, labouring at the self-imposed task with a reasoning power and indomitable courage and perserverance that is not to be equalled in the annals of dumb creation. Truly and emphatically a Member of the Royal Humane Society, and worthy to be ranked with the lifeboatsman of our coasts, and the heroes of our Fire Brigades.

My ideal Newfoundland must be great in body as well as soul, with a grand and massive head; broad benevolent brow; small, dark, very intelligent eyes, ordinarily soft with affection but capable of flaming with anger on occasion; small ears hanging close to his head; deep muzzle, not too long; and the whole head and face covered with short hair that feels like velvet to the touch.

His neck is rather long and very muscular; his body proportionate and compact, with well-sprung ribs, and clothed with a dense, flat, water-resisting coat of a deep, rich black colour, long in the neck, where it almost assumes the proportions of a mane; plenty of feather on the tail and fore legs, which must be straight and strong with ample bone, for with these he chiefly battles with the waves, and wins his way. His hind legs are not quite so powerful, and less feathered.

He must be a low-built dog, for anything like legginess would detract from his appearance - that grand, solid, reassuring bulk suitable for a life in the sea. No water animal in the world is long-legged, least of all should the Newfoundland be so. His gait is that of a bear, without the clumsiness; that is to say, he advances the front and hind legs of the same side simultaneously. It is a sea-dog's walk, but he is active withal, as you shall find our British sailors when there is work to do on land with a naval brigade. And let him but glimpse the sea, and you can realise the spirit that is in him, as his exuberant delight carries him with a rush to his favourite element.

For the rest, affectionate, tractable, and especially kind to children, he endears himself to all. As a guardian unsurpassable; always mute except when there is actual danger to be apprehended. Finally - and this is the greatest tax upon his nature - my ideal Newfoundland is not quarrelsome with others of his kind, but bears with them all, his lofty spirit comprehending that though he is their king, out of consideration for his mistress's prejudices he must not insist upon being their autocrat."

The Irish Spotted Newfoundland: The "M" Word, Again

In researching the effect of color on type and health in Newfoundlands, I came across the following discussion of Irish Spotted Newfoundlands:

"An Irish Spotted Newfoundland is a black Newfoundland with white markings.
These white markings are on the tips of the toes, chest, and tail.
Irish spotted is just a term used, not a color.
In reality, it is a mismarked black dog."

There are at least three "mis"understandings in those comments.

Starting with the AKC Breed Standard for the Newfoundland: "Color is secondary to type, structure, and soundness. Recognized Newfoundland colors are black, brown, gray, and white and black.
Solid Colors-Blacks, Browns, and Grays may appear as solid colors or solid colors with white at
any, some, or all, of the following locations: chin, chest, toes, and tip of tail. Any amount of
white found at these locations is typical and is not penalized. Also typical are a tinge of bronze on a black or gray coat and lighter furnishings on a brown or gray coat." (Emphasis supplied.)

It's not just white at the "toes, chest, and tail" but also the chin (and elsewhere). It's also incorrect to state that an IS "is a black Newfoundland with white markings." Any acceptable (standard) color is allowed to have white at these locations, including in the United States, a black, brown and grey Newfoundland.

The AKC Breed Standard also states: "Markings, on either Solid Colors or Landseers, might deviate considerably from those described and should be penalized only to the extent of the deviation."

Thus, white markings on a black, brown and gray Newfoundland may deviate from the specified areas, even "considerably," and should only be penalized (not disqualified) to the extent of the deviation.

Finally, a black, brown or gray Newfoundland with white markings at the chin, chest, toes and tip of tail "is typical." Such Newfies are not "mismarked" (not improperly marked) but adhere to the Breed Standard.

The Newfoundland - A Fisherman

It’s not unheard of for dog to be “fishing partners,” as it were. Various instances are on record of dogs being used to drive fish into nets, including one dog described by Rev. William Hamilton: The dog took his post in a shallow end of a ford and at some distance below the net. If a salmon escaped the net, the dog watched for a tell-tale ripple in the water and either tried to turn the fish back, or catch it. Another account was written of a black and tan water spaniel belonging to John Matthews. “His quickness and dexterity were wonderful; for he seldom broke out gut or the skin of the fish, and never lost after he had once mouthed him.”

Not everyone was enchanted with the fishing prowess of dogs. In the 18th century, the Earl of Home owned a Newfoundland that was better at catching salmon than the Earl was, himself. According British fishing expert, Fred Buller, whose story is recounted in the Domesday Book of Giant Salmon, the Newf was credited with catching up to twenty salmon in a morning all on his own. A neighbor living on the opposite bank of the river Tweed, Lord Tankerville, was not amused. He began a legal process against the dog citing an unfair way of reducing the local supply of salmon. The case was brought before the Court of Session and was named, “The Earl of Tankerville versus a Dog, the property of the Earl of Home.” Judgment was found in favor of the Dog.

(Peter Maniate wrote more about “fishing Newfoundlands” in a Facebook post, “Fisher Dog.”)