Uncle Dick's Rolf 1/2
The first part of the thirty-ninth tale from The Animal Book
I had been riding for five or six miles one pleasant afternoon. It was a delicious afternoon, like the afternoon of an English summer day. You always imagine it hotter out in Africa by a good deal than it is in England, don’t you? Well, so it is, in a general way, a vast deal hotter, but every now and then, after the rains have fallen and the wind comes blowing from the sea, we get a day as much like one of our own best summer days as you ever felt anywhere. This afternoon was just like an English summer afternoon, with the fresh sweet breeze rustling amongst the green leaves and the great bright sea stretching out all blue and golden and meeting the blue sky miles and miles away.
It wasn’t very hot, but it was just hot enough to make the thought of a swim delicious, so after I had been riding leisurely along for some little time, shooting a bird or two as I went—for I wanted some bright feathers to send home to a little cousin that I had in England—I alighted from my horse and, letting him loose to graze, lay down for a quarter of an hour to cool myself and then began to make ready for my plunge.
I was standing on a little ledge of cliff, some six or seven feet above the sea. It was high tide, and the water at my feet was about a fathom deep.
“I shall have a delightful swim,” I thought to myself as I threw off my coat, and as just at that moment Rolf in a very excited way flung himself upon me, evidently understanding the meaning of the proceeding and, as I thought, anxious to show his sympathy with it. I repeated the remark aloud. “Yes, we’ll have a delightful swim, you and I together,” I said. “A grand swim, my old lad.”
I clapped his back as I spoke and encouraged him, as I was in the habit of doing, to express his feelings without reserve. But rather to my surprise, instead of wagging his tail, and wrinkling his nose, and performing any of his usual antics, the creature only lifted up his face and began to whine.
He had lain, for the quarter of an hour while I had been resting, at the edge of the little cliff with his head dropped over it, but whether he had been taking a sleep in that position or had been amusing himself by watching the waves was more than I knew. He was a capital one for sleeping even then and generally made a point of snatching a doze at every convenient opportunity, so I had naturally troubled my head very little about him, taking it for granted that he was at his usual occupation. But whether he had been asleep before or not, at any rate he was wide awake now and, as it seemed to me, in a very odd humor indeed.
‘What’s the matter, old fellow?” I said to him when he set up this dismal howl. “Don’t you want to have a swim? Well, you needn’t unless you like, only I mean to have one. So down with you and let me get my clothes off.”
But instead of getting down, the creature began to conduct himself in the most incomprehensible way, first seizing me by the trousers with his teeth and pulling me to the edge of the rock, as if he wanted me to plunge in dressed as I was, then catching me again and dragging me back, much as though I was a big rat that he was trying to worry. This pantomime, I declare, he went through three separate times, barking and whining all the while, till I began to think he was going out of his mind.
Well, God forgive me, but at last I got into a passion with the beast! I couldn’t conceive what he meant. For two or three minutes I tried to pacify him, and as long as I took no more steps to get my clothes off, he was willing to be pacified. But the instant I fell to undressing myself again, he was on me once more, pulling me this way and that, hanging on my arms, slobbering over me, howling with his mouth up in the air. And so at last I lost my temper, and I snatched up my gun and struck him with the butt end of it. My poor Rolf!
He was quieter after I had struck him. For a few moments he lay quite still at my feet, and I had begun to think that his crazy fit was over and that he was going to give me no more trouble, when all at once, just as I had gotten ready to jump into the water, the creature sprang to his feet and flung himself upon me again. He threw himself with all his might upon my breast and drove me backwards, howling so wildly that many a time since, boys, I have thought I must have been no better than a blind, perverse fool not to have guessed what the trouble was.
But the fact is, I was a conceited young fellow (as most young fellows are), and because I imagined the poor beast was trying for some reason of his own to get his own way, I thought it was my business to teach him that he was not to get his own way but that I was to get mine. And so I beat him down somehow—I don’t like to think of it now. I struck him again three or four times with the end of my gun till at last I got myself freed from him.
He gave a cry when he fell back. I call it a cry, for it was more like something human than a dog’s howl—something so wild and pathetic that, angry as I was, it startled me, and I almost think, if time enough had been given me, I would have made some last attempt then to understand what the creature meant, but I had no time after that.
I was standing a few feet in from the water, and as soon as I had shaken him off he went to the edge of the bit of cliff and stood there for a moment till I came up to him, and then—just as in another second I should have jumped into the sea—my brave dog, my noble dog, gave one last whine and one look into my face and took the leap before me. And then, boys, in another instant I saw what he had meant. He had scarcely touched the water when I saw a crocodile slip like lightning from a sunny ledge of the cliff and grip him by the hinder legs.
The End, Part One