Captures

Its psychic origin, like that of most human loves and hates, was obscure, and yet, like most human hates and loves, had a definite point of physical departure—the moment when Bowden’s yellow dog bit Steer’s ungaitered leg. Even then it might not have ‘got going’ as they say, but for the village sense of justice which caused Steer to bring his gun next day and solemnly execute the dog. He was the third person the dog had bitten; and not even Bowden, who was fond of his whippet, could oppose the execution, but the shot left him with an obscure feeling of lost property, a vague sense of disloyalty to his dog. Steer was a Northerner, an Easterner, a man from a part called Lincolnshire, outlandish, like the Frisian cattle he mixed with the Devons on his farm—this, Bowden could not help feeling in the bottom of his soul, was what had moved his dog. Snip had not liked, any more than his master, that thin, spry, red-grey-bearded chap’s experimental ways of farming, his habit of always being an hour, a week, a month earlier than Bowden; had not liked his lean, dry activity, his thin legs, his east-wind air. Bowden knew that he would have shot Steer’s dog if he himself had been the third person bitten by it; but then Steer’s dog had not bitten Bowden, Bowden’s dog had bitten Steer; and this seemed to Bowden to show that his dog knew what was what. While he was burying the poor brute he had muttered: “Damn the man! What did he want trapesin’ about my yard in his Sunday breeks? Seein’ what he could get, I suppose!” And with each shovel of earth he threw on the limp yellow body, a sticky resentment had oozed from his spirit and clung, undissolving, round the springs of its action.