Much Michael learned from Jerry of the varied life of the forest and fields.  To run with Jerry seemed the one pleasure he took, for he never played.  Play had passed out of him.  He was not precisely morose or gloomy from his years on the trained-animal stage and in Harris Collins’s college of pain, but he was sobered, subdued.  The spring and the spontaneity had gone out of him.  Just as the leopard had claw-marked his shoulder so that damp and frosty weather made the pain of the old wound come back, so was his mind marked by what he had gone through.  He liked Jerry, was glad to be with him and to run with him; but it was Jerry who was ever in the lead, who ever raised the hue and cry of hunting pursuit, who barked indignation and eager yearning at a tree’d squirrel in refuge forty feet above the ground.  Michael looked on and listened, but took no part in such antics of enthusiasm.

In the same way he looked on when Jerry fought fearful comic battles with Norman Chief, the great Percheron stallion.  It was only play, for Jerry and Norman Chief were tried friends; and, though the huge horse, ears laid back, mouth open to bite, pursued Jerry in mad gyrations all about the paddock, it was with no thought of inflicting hurt, but merely to act up to his part in the sham battle.  Yet no invitation of Jerry’s could induce Michael to join in the fun.  He contented himself with sitting down outside the rails and looking on.

“Why play?” might Michael have asked, who had had all play taken out of him.

But when it came to serious work, he was there even ahead of Jerry.  On account of foot-and-mouth disease and of hog-cholera, strange dogs were taboo on the Kennan ranch.  It did not take Michael long to learn this, and stray dogs got short shrift from him.  With never a warning bark nor growl, in deadly silence, he rushed them, slashed and bit them, rolled them over and over in the dust, and drove them from the place.  It was like nigger-chasing, a service to perform for the gods whom he loved and who willed such chasing.

No wild passion of love, such as he had had for Steward, did he bear Villa and Harley, but he did develop for them a great, sober love.  He did not go out of his way to express it with overtures of wrigglings and squirmings and whimpering yelpings.  Jerry could be depended upon for that.  But he was always seriously glad to be with Villa and Harley and to receive recognition from them next after Jerry.  Some of his deepest moments of content, before the fireplace, were to sit beside Villa or Harley and lean his head against a knee and have a hand, on occasion, drop down on his head or gently twist his crinkled ear.

Jerry was even guilty of playing with children who happened at times to be under the Kennan aegis.  Michael endured children for as long as they left him alone.  If they waxed familiar, he would warn them with a bristling of his neck-hair and a throaty rumbling and get up and stalk away.