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In Alistair MacLeods short stories As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (Birds) and Winter Dog, MacLeod emphasizes the power of past memories to influence the present. In each story, both of which take place in Cape Breton, Macleod describes how fates and fortunes intertwine with the life and devotion of dogs with their male owners. In Winter Dog, the dog is a symbol of the narrators youth, while the canine in Birds symbolizes family myth or a deathly curse. The cultural depictions of dogs in both short stories symbolize guidance, protection, strength and faithfulness. They are also symbols of protective powers, loyalty and often appear in the myth and folklore of Celtic lands. Is having a dog in one of Macleods short stories a blessing, curse or both? This essay will look at both stories in detail.
Brothers and sister I bid you beware/Of giving your heart to a dog to tear . This quote taken from the poem The Power of the Dog by Kipling, illustrates the torment the owner of a dog faces should they embark on owning one. Dogs can be a source of such joy in your life but this is also matched or even surpassed by the pain and sorrow they can also bring as anyone who has owned a dog or several in their lifetime can well attest. The agony of owning a dog can come from many sources: the dog can die too soon of an illness or an accident or worse, the dog can live fifteen years and then tear your heart out because you loved it for so long. For the narrators in both stories, owning a dog comes with an understanding that it will be a blessing or curse and that the truth will surface eventually about which one it is.
The dogs in these short stories arrived as pups (in a box or crate) from elsewhere. One dog saves a life (the golden one), while another dog (the grey one), mistakenly takes a life. The female dog in Birds (the title signifies a folk belief) had been left, when a pup, at the familys gate in a small handmade box and no one knew where she had come from or that she would eventually grow to such a size. (MacLeod 118). The unnamed protagonist in the story Winter Dog, after seeing his children playing with a neighbours dog in their yard, recalls the time his family purchased a male dog when he was twelve and he came as a pup of about two months in a crate to the railroad station which was about eight miles from where we lived. (MacLeod 36).
The strength of both dogs is remarked upon early in each story. In the opening paragraph of Birds, the dog is given the heroic Gaelic name, cù mòr glas (the big grey one). The Irish word for hound is cù, which is also the first syllable in the name of the great heroes Cùchulainn and Cù Roi. (Monaghan 132). It is fascinating that MacLeod chose the colour grey for the dog in Birds because in Celtic mythology and folklore, it is the black dog that warns of war, death or death-warning (Monaghan 132). The green dog in Celtic mythology, Cù Síth, barked loudly but could only bark three times, however on the third bark, it sprang forward and devoured anyone nearby. (Monaghan 132). The name of cù mor glas is altered later in the story.
Cù mor glas is described by her owner as large and grey, a sort of staghound from another time. And if she jumped up to lick his face, which she loved to do, she would be on the verge of knocking him down and he would be forced to take two or three backward steps before he could regain his balance. (MacLeod 118). This habit of the grateful dog jumping up to lick the mans face illustrates her loyalty to her owner (also an ominous warning of a future event). She is so strong that, while still a puppy, cù mòr glas survives being run over by the steel wheel of a horse-drawn cart suffering from crushed ribs and broken bones (MacLeod 118).
The dog is grateful to her owner for nursing her back to health from her carriage injury despite his family urging that her neck be broken by his strong hands or that he grasp her by the hind legs and swing her head against a rock, thus putting an end to her misery. (MacLeod 119). The dog must have known she was a lost cause so she was appreciative of her owners unwavering care for her as by all rights she should have died from that accident and her later injuries. In her book, Shameless: The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, Cristiana Franco states that when the master raises and cares for the dog, the ethical model that regulates their relationship tends to appear, through the language of duty and debt for care received, quite parallel to that of parent-child relationships. (Franco 123).
The narrator in Winter Dog describes his golden canine as tremendously strong and in the winter months I would hitch him to a sleigh which he pulled easily and willingly on almost any kind of surface. When he was harnessed I used to put a collar around his neck and attach a light line to it so that I might have some minimum control over him, but it was hardly ever needed. He would pull home the Christmas tree or bag of flour or the deer which was shot far back in the woods; and when we visited our winter snares he would pull home the gunnysacks which contained the partridges and rabbits we gathered. (MacLeod 38). Here the dog proves his loyalty because he was purchased to be a cattle collie dog and, ultimately, as a working dog, turned out to be no good at all and no one knew why. (MacLeod 37). Dogs proving their loyalty to their masters dates back to ancient times. In fact, when the last king of the Persians died, Darius III, everyone abandoned him except his loyal dog. His dog remained at his side despite knowing he would no longer be nurtured by Darius (Franco 47).
Perhaps the dog sensed that specific duties were expected of him and when he brought panic instead of order and to make things worse instead of better (MacLeod 37), his owner stuck by him and the dog rewarded him with unwavering loyalty and strength. Or, as Franco states in her book, that even when it performs tasks on a human beings behalf, the dog acts with autonomy: its up to the dog to decide whether it will respect the command or not. (Franco 170). The dog was also described unfavourably as worse than nothing (38). Yet still, the family stuck by him despite the dog being unremarkable in almost every way and he continued to grow grey and golden and was, as everyone agreed, a beautiful-looking dog. (MacLeod 38). Unlike the dog in Birds who warranted being named, the dog in Winter Dog was never given a name. Perhaps this was due to the unworthiness of the mutt (he was suspected of having German Shepherd blood), or the narrator simply thought this detail unimportant.
The dog in Birds eventually healed from her injuries and the family gradually became accustomed to her. One day, during a spring thaw, the dog bolted for some unbeknownst reason, never to return. The family, in addition to the father who raised her and nursed her back to health, had become attached to her and were morose at the dogs sudden departure. A full year passed from the time the dog vanished to the day when the father and two of his teenaged sons were fishing by a small islet and he spotted his beloved dog on top of the islands highest hill. He shouted out Meudal cù mòr glas , which meant dear or darling in Gaelic (MacLeod 121). The dog saw his former owner and darted down the hill at once. Cù mòr glas jumped up and put her large paws on his shoulders as she used to do when she was younger. The father was on unstable ground, however, and he fell under the weight of the enormous dog. On the same hill cù mòr glas had come sprinting down, six more dogs suddenly appeared over the top of the hill. They had never seen this stranger, who was still struggling under their mother and mistook her actions as one of self-defence. Or perhaps these pups attacked because they had not been raised by humans and had grown up in the wilds of Cape Breton. Their animal instincts quickly took over:
They fell upon him in a fury, slashing his face and tearing aside his lower jaw and ripping out his throat, crazed with blood-lust or duty or perhaps starvation. The cù mòr glas turned on them in her own savagery, slashing and snarling and, it seemed, crazed by their mistake; driving them bloodied and yelping before her, back over the brow of the hill where they vanished from sight but could still be heard screaming in the distance. It all took perhaps little more than a minute (MacLeod 121-122)
The father died from his wounds and the dog and her pups were never seen again, or never seen again in the same way. (MacLeod 123). Over the years, there were sporadic sightings of cù mòr glas and she grew into a legend like the Loch Ness Monster or the Sasquatch on a smaller scale. (MacLeod 123). The younger son on the boat that fateful day began having nightmares of his father being torn to shreds. He started to call the dog the cù mòr glas á bhàis, the big grey dog of death. His night terrors became so frequent that he imagined he saw the dog everywhere and he wound up taking his own life with a fishing knife to the throat and then plunging into the ocean. Another brother lived until the age of forty but was killed outside a pub in Glasgow one night by a large, grey-haired man and supposedly, six other large, grey-haired men who beat him to death on the cobblestones (124). The colour grey and the number six figured prominently in the death of this particular brother. The family blamed this on the curse of the cù mòr glas á bhàis, and would continue to do so for generations. Near the end of the story, the narrator is in the hospital with his five grey-haired brothers, keeping vigil by their dying father. The oldest brother drove down from Montreal and took great pains to avoid Greyhound bus stations just to not tempt fate. The family is well aware that their beliefs of the big grey dog of death are seen as strange by most and shared by no one but them, but there are also men who believe the earth is flat and that the birds bring forth the sun. (MacLeod 127).
As we can see, the dog in Birds started off as a blessing but resulted in a curse for the owner and future generations of his family.
The short story Winter Dog does not dwell in the world of mythology like Birds, and in contrast, it turns a curse into a blessing. The latter part of the story in Winter Dog focuses on the narrator as a boy, going with his dog to check their snares one snowy winter Sunday. The dog and his owner spotted a dead seal on the ice and decided to inspect it. The narrator decided to take the seal home and strapped a harness to his dog and attached him to a sleigh. The dog suddenly became uneasy and started to whine but the owner did not pay attention to the dogs clairvoyant behaviour. After about two hundred yards, the dog and sleigh crashed through the thin ice and plunged into the icy depths. When the dog popped out of the ice, the owner frantically tried to grab him by the collar. He managed to free the dog from the water and took off the harness. The dog then began to walk around him in circles whining once more as perhaps a warning, and then bolted for the trees. The boy continued along, only to fall through the ice himself. He cried out and his loyal dog returned immediately, though the dog was himself freezing and afraid. As the dog moved closer to his owner in the ice, the boy grabbed the dogs harness. The resilient dog then backed up pulling the boy out of the freezing water. Now both were in fear of hypothermia, but the dog lead his owner back safely through the snowstorm and to home.
The boy was so afraid of being found foolish or disobedient that he snuck back into the house with the dog, changed his clothes and then went downstairs to the party going on in his house. Some guests wondered why the dog was soaking wet but the boy never told any one of the afternoons experience or that he had saved my life. (MacLeod 47). Two years after saving his masters life, the dog was shot in a neighbours yard. Despite being shot and losing a lot of blood, the mighty dog still managed to drag himself three-quarters of a mile towards home. The boy later learns that his own father had asked the neighbour to shoot the dog: that same dog who had saved his sons life two years earlier: that same dog that began as a curse to the family who had spent good money to get him only to end up as a blessing as a lifesaver. The dog was killed for many reasons:
The dog had become increasingly powerful and protective, to the extent that people were afraid to come in the yard. And he had also bitten two of the neighbours children and caused them to be frightened of passing our house on their journeys to and from school. And perhaps there was also the feeling in the community that he was getting more than his share of the breeding: that he travelled farther than other dogs on his nightly forays and that he fought off and injured the other smaller dogs who might compete with him for female favours. Perhaps there was fear that his dominance and undesirable characteristics did not bode well for future generations. (MacLeod 48-49)
The narrator, now a father, recalls the memory of his dog as he sees his own children playing with a dog. He now knows he is only alive to father his children solely based on the unselfish actions of his faithful dog who placed himself in harms way to save his owners life and then was killed for his loyalty. The recollection of his dog persists in [his] memory and in [his] life and he persists physically as well. There, in the golden-grey dogs with their black-tipped ears and tails, sleeping in the stables or in the lees of woodpiles or under the porches or curled beside the houses which face towards the sea. (MacLeod 49).
As we can see, the dogs in both stories remained etched in the memories of those they had touched long after they were gone. Both dogs initially blessed their owners with unwavering loyalty and support but then were paradoxically damned for simply being what they were, dogs. For the owners in the stories, having a dog acted as both a blessing and a curse. The family of Birds did not try to uncover their blessing but rather succumbed to their generational affliction. As the narrator in Winter Dog acknowledges, a curse should immediately follow on the heels of a blessing-that being, without the sacrifice of his golden dog, he would not be alive today.
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