“Pep sniffed at his master’s face eagerly.”
Page 96
PEP
The Story of a
Brave Dog
By
CLARENCE HAWKES
ILLUSTRATED By
WILLIAM VAN DRESSER
MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY
SPRINGFIELD · MASSACHUSETTS
Copyright, 1922
By MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY
Springfield, Massachusetts
All Rights Reserved
Bradley Quality Books
Printed in United States of America
To Dog-Lovers,
the whole world over,
this book is fraternally
dedicated
INTRODUCTION
A FRIEND TO MAN
By Clarence Hawkes
IT is almost like a stern irony of fate,that man’s faithful, gentle friend, thedog, should have sprung from one of themost thoroughly hated and despised brutesin the animal kingdom, the wolf.
Yet this is a scientific fact. The wolf,with all his meanness and skulking cunning,is the progenitor of man’s friend, the dog.
They belong to the same family, theirbreeding habits are alike, and the wolf is assurely the father of the dog, as was bruteman, the cave dweller, the ancestor of thehighly civilized creature we now know.
In the case of the man it has taken untoldages to bring about the change, and so it hasin the case of the dog. When in the dark[6]ages the brute man crouched over his campfire,gazing fearfully into the darkness abouthim, encompassed by superstition and ignorance,the gray wolf hung upon the outskirtsof his campfire.
This man creature, that ran upon twolegs instead of four, who had such strangepower over fire and water, and over theforces of nature and the wild kindred, fascinatedand drew him with a terrible power.
Try as he would he could not keep awayfrom him. Often this man creaturewounded him with his sharp stick. He alsopoisoned the wolf pack, but still they couldnot be driven away, for it was an unwrittenlaw of nature that some day they should beinseparable.
So the wolf skulked upon the trail of theprimitive man, until the famine, or the cold,or some other stern necessity brought themtogether.
Indians, even now in the far north, oftentake the wolf whelps from the den and playwith them, and they refer to the wolf as“Grandfather’s dog,” showing that they understandthe gradual evolution of the dog.[7]You can better understand this if you visitany of their villages where the dogs evennow are little more than partly domesticatedwolves, wolfish in habits, and looks. Suchis the Husky, the famous team dog of thefrozen north, without whose help the wealthof the Klondyke and other remote placescould hardly have b