Dog

The Dog is part of Caspar Leinen’s remembered childhood at Rossthal, where dogs belong to the ordinary life of the house and its grounds. One young dog’s rescue of a fallen mallard reveals a striking contrast between animal initiative and human ideas of usefulness: Hans Meyer responds with tenderness, yet ultimately judges the dog by whether he can serve as a gun dog. Years later, the sound of dogs barking returns to Leinen in memory, joining the animals to a childhood world that is no longer present.

At Rossthal

During a Christmas visit to the Green House, Leinen and Philipp sit beside the tall fireplace, smoking Philipp’s grandfather’s cigars and planning the days ahead. The family’s three dogs sleep on the stone floor of the entrance hall. They are not allowed upstairs, a small domestic boundary that places them visibly within the shared household while keeping them out of its upper rooms.

The dogs belong to the scene’s settled routine: the boys sit by the fire as the animals rest nearby. Their presence helps make the house a place of childhood familiarity, distinct from the coldness of Leinen’s father’s home. The narrative does not identify these three dogs as the same animal involved in the duck-shooting memory.

The Mallard and the Young Dog

In another memory, Leinen recalls a winter duck shoot. After his father fires and a mallard falls onto the pond’s ice, the young dog runs out to retrieve it before waiting for his master’s signal. The ice in the middle of the pond gives way beneath him. Even in the freezing water, he does not turn back; he swims through the broken ice and brings the duck to shore.

The dog’s action is not obedience to a command: he has gone ahead of the signal, and the rescue depends on his own persistence. Leinen’s father responds immediately to the danger the animal has survived. He takes off his jacket, rubs the dog dry with its lining, and carries him home inside it. For two days he sits by the fire with the dog on his knees while it recovers.

Once the dog is well again, Leinen’s father gives him to a family in the village. His stated reason is practical: the dog will never make a gun dog. That decision sits uneasily beside the care he has just shown. The dog has acted courageously, but his future in the household is still measured against the work he cannot perform.

Barking as a Return of Memory

Years later, on waking at the Green House, Leinen thinks he can hear dogs barking in the morning, along with crockery clattering in the dining room. For a moment, Philipp is there as he was in boyhood: pale, untidy, dressed in pyjamas and an unbelted dressing gown, smiling and waving. The barking is part of a remembered domestic soundscape, not evidence that the dog from the duck-shooting memory has returned.

The brief recollection makes the dogs more than background company. Their morning noise helps call up a former household and the childhood friendship attached to it; the memory arrives through familiar sounds before Leinen fully settles back into the present. Across these scenes, the Dog is neither simply a tool nor merely an emblem: the young animal acts on his own, while the humans around him both care for him and assess him by his usefulness.