Jack London - Michael, Brother of Jerry

As it was, Michael’s unusual behaviour seemed to fascinate her. She approached him tentatively, without further racket; and the boy who had her in charge slacked the thin chain that held her.

“Hope he breaks her back for her,” was his unholy wish; for he hated Sara intensely, desiring to be with the lions or elephants rather than dancing attendance on a cantankerous female monkey there was no reasoning with.

And because Michael took no notice of her, she made up to him. It was not long before she had her hands on him, and, quickly after that, an arm around his neck and her head snuggled against his. Then began her interminable tale. Day after day, catching him at odd times in the ring, she would cling closely to him and in a low voice, running on and on, never pausing for breath, tell him, for all he knew, the story of her life. At any rate, it sounded like the story of her woes and of all the indignities which had been wreaked upon her. It was one long complaint, and some of it might have been about her health, for she sniffed and coughed a great deal and her chest seemed always to hurt her from the way she had of continually and gingerly pressing the palm of her hand to it. Sometimes, however, she would cease her complaining, and love and mother him, uttering occasional series of gentle mellow sounds that were like croonings.

Hers was the only hand of affection that was laid on him at Cedarwild, and she was ever gentle, never pinching him, never pulling his ears. By the same token, he was the only friend she had; and he came to look forward to meeting her in the course of the morning work—and this, despite that every meeting always concluded in a scene, when she fought with her keeper against being taken away. Her cries and protests would give way to whimperings and wailings, while the men about laughed at the strangeness of the love-affair between her and the Irish terrier.

But Harris Collins tolerated, even encouraged, their friendship.

“The two sour-balls get along best together,” he said. “And it does them good. Gives them something to live for, and that way lies health. But some day, mark my words, she’ll turn on him and give him what for, and their friendship will get a terrible smash.”

And half of it he spoke with the voice of prophecy, and, though she never turned on Michael, the day in the world was written when their friendship would truly receive a terrible smash.

“Now seals are too wise,” Collins explained one day, in a sort of extempore lecture to several of his apprentice trainers. “You’ve just got to toss fish to them when they perform. If you don’t, they won’t, and there’s an end of it. But you can’t depend on feeding dainties to dogs, for instance, though you can make a young, untrained pig perform creditably by means of a nursing bottle hidden up your sleeve.”

“All you have to do is think it over. Do you think you can make those greyhounds extend themselves with the promise of a bite of meat? It’s the whip that makes them extend.—Look over there at Billy Green. There ain’t another way to teach that dog that trick. You can’t love her into doing it. You can’t pay her to do it. There’s only one way, and that’s make her.”

Billy Green, at the moment, was training a tiny, nondescript, frizzly-haired dog. Always, on the stage, he made a hit by drawing from his pocket a tiny dog that would do this particular trick. The last one had died from a wrenched back, and he was now breaking in a new one. He was catching the little mite by the hind-legs and tossing it up in the air, where, making a half-flip and descending head first, it was supposed to alight with its forefeet on his hand and there balance itself, its hind feet and body above it in the air. Again and again he stooped, caught her hind-legs and flung her up into the half-turn. Almost frozen with fear, she vainly strove to effect the trick. Time after time, and every time, she failed to make the balance. Sometimes she fell crumpled; several times she all but struck the ground: and once, she did strike, on her side and so hard as to knock the breath out of her. Her master, taking advantage of the moment to wipe the sweat from his streaming face, nudged her about with his toe till she staggered weakly to her feet.

“The dog was never born that’d learn that trick for the promise of a bit of meat,” Collins went on. “Any more than was the dog ever born that’d walk on its forelegs without having its hind-legs rapped up in the air with the stick a thousand times. Yet you take that trick there. It’s always a winner, especially with the women—so cunning, you know, so adorable cute, to be yanked out of its beloved master’s pocket and to have such trust and confidence in him as to allow herself to be tossed around that way. Trust and confidence hell! He’s put the fear of God into her, that’s what.”

“Just the same, to dig a dainty out of your pocket once in a while and give an animal a nibble, always makes a hit with the audience. That’s about all it’s good for, yet it’s a good stunt. Audiences like to believe that the animals enjoy doing their tricks, and that they are treated like pampered darlings, and that they just love their masters to death. But God help all of us and our meal tickets if the audiences could see behind the scenes. Every trained-animal turn would be taken off the stage instanter, and we’d be all hunting for a job.”

“Yes, and there’s rough stuff no end pulled off on the stage right before the audience’s eyes. The best fooler I ever saw was Lottie’s. She had a bunch of trained cats. She loved them to death right before everybody, especially if a trick wasn’t going good. What’d she do? She’d take that cat right up in her arms and kiss it. And when she put it down it’d perform the trick all right all right, while the audience applauded its silly head off for the kindness and humaneness she’d shown. Kiss it? Did she? I’ll tell you what she did. She bit its nose.”

“Eleanor Pavalo learned the trick from Lottie, and used it herself on her toy dogs. And many a dog works on the stage in a spiked collar, and a clever man can twist a dog’s nose and nobody in the audience any the wiser. But it’s the fear that counts. It’s what the dog knows he’ll get afterward when the turn’s over that keeps most of them straight.”

“Remember Captain Roberts and his great Danes. They weren’t pure-breds, though. He must have had a dozen of them—toughest bunch of brutes I ever saw. He boarded them here twice. You couldn’t go among them without a club in your hand. I had a Mexican lad laid up by them. He was a tough one, too. But they got him down and nearly ate him. The doctors took over forty stitches in him and shot him full of that Pasteur dope for hydrophobia. And he always will limp with his right leg from what the dogs did to him. I tell you, they were the limit. And yet, every time the curtain went up, Captain Roberts brought the house down with the first stunt. Those dogs just flocked all over him, loving him to death, from the looks of it. And were they loving him? They hated him. I’ve seen him, right here in the cage at Cedarwild, wade into them with a club and whale the stuffing impartially out of all of them. Sure, they loved him not. Just a bit of the same old aniseed was what he used. He’d soak small pieces of meat in aniseed oil and stick them in his pockets. But that stunt would only work with a bunch of giant dogs like his. It was their size that got it across. Had they been a lot of ordinary dogs it would have looked silly. And, besides, they didn’t do their regular tricks for aniseed. They did it for Captain Roberts’s club. He was a tough bird himself.”

“He used to say that the art of training animals was the art of inspiring them with fear. One of his assistants told me a nasty one about him afterwards. They had an off month in Los Angeles, and Captain Roberts got it into his head he was going to make a dog balance a silver dollar on the neck of a champagne bottle. Now just think that over and try to see yourself loving a dog into doing it. The assistant said he wore out about as many sticks as dogs, and that he wore out half a dozen dogs. He used to get them from the public pound at two and a half apiece, and every time one died he had another ready and waiting. And he succeeded with the seventh dog. I’m telling you, it learned to balance a dollar on the neck of a bottle. And it died from the effects of the learning within a week after he put it on the stage. Abscesses in the lungs, from the stick.”