Penny by Hal; Borland Page A

she shut up before I even got out of bed, and finally she stopped altogether. I lay awake another half hour, waiting for the next spasm, and finally drifted off to sleep. And we slept the rest of the night.
    Apparently she got most of the “I won’t” out of her that one day. She was her familiar friendly self when I went to let her out. She frolicked ahead of me to the house, ate a big bowl of breakfast, went outside for ten minutes and came back and asked to be let in. She was the perfect house dog. I had to go to the village in midmorning to do several errands, and Barbara said Penny wouldn’t let her out of her sight while I was gone, as though Barbara was her special responsibility.
    That afternoon she napped in the house for an hour, went for a long walk with us, then lay on the front steps till about five o’clock. Then she went out across the pasture and prowled the mountainside, barking trail from time to time, for almost an hour. When she came back she hadn’t wallowed in one seep spring, hadn’t been down in the river mud and wasn’t in a nasty mood. She came back, asked to be let in, ate her evening meal, napped in the living room till nine o’clock. Then she went off to bed in the brooder house without a whimper. And she slept all night, apparently. At least she didn’t rouse us with any tantrums.
    The next morning Barbara said, “Penny seems to have got hold of herself. I think she’s going to settle down all right.”
    Two days later we took her down to the place at the lake.
    It was a beautiful June day, sunny and warm and with just enough air in motion to be comfortable. The camp there is a cabin with a living room, a tiny kitchen and two small dressing rooms. It has a six-foot deck across the front facing the water. The lakeshore there is precipitous, with a drop of about twenty feet from the deck to the water’s edge. A series of steps go down over the ledge to the dock. There is a ten-foot overhead glass door opening onto the deck, so one gets the feeling of being right outdoors and, on the deck, suspended in midair.
    Penny left the farmhouse merely pleased at going for a ride. She loved to ride in the car. She slobbered on the window and slithered on the seat, smirked at the big black cat down the road and looked superciliously at the police dog just beyond. Then she lay down and dozed for ten minutes. She woke and sat up when we got to the top of the hill at the lake place. This was something new, a new woodland and, undoubtedly, brand new smells. She sniffed, at any rate, and watched with intense interest as I drove down the steep, winding road to the parking place just above our camp. When we got out she turned and looked at the lake, probably more water than she had ever seen. She stared at it, trembling. Then she went down the steps to the cabin with us, went in, looked around. At the two built-in bunks, at the chairs, at the two chaises. Then at us, with a “What’s this all about?” look.
    I opened the big front door to the deck. Penny watched, then hurried to see what was outside. A deck. A platform with narrow spaces between the floor boards, with a railing across the front. She went to the railing, took one look, almost sat back on her haunches. Then she edged forward again, looked at the tops of the gray birches, the shadbush, the mountain honeysuckle that grew beneath the deck, looked down at the dock with the sailboat lying on it, bottom side up, looked out across the water toward the far shore, almost a mile away. Then she looked up at Barbara, standing beside her at the railing, and wagged her tail tentatively. She looked at me. Obviously it was all right or I wouldn’t let Barbara stand there at the rail. Penny looked again, then turned and went inside and lay down in the sun. It was quite clear that she could take the camp and the lake or leave them, that she was not a spaniel or any other breed that loved the water. I