could rush at the joker in his hearts and pat his trousers a little or bite his hand, though not much: in this respect, he always looked after himself - with his fangs it was worth nothing to bite through an arm or leg, but for everything the time that he lived with me, he didn’t seriously bite anyone, even the Zapyantsovsky little man Leshka Parshin, nicknamed Amanita.

6
Fly agaric appeared in Kuzhenkino a long time ago. He got here by chance: with a new brigade of covens - there used to be a lot of them hanging around the villages and villages - he was hired to build a house for the widow Borova. He cut down the house, but he remained with the widow - in a new house. As a peasant, he was invisible, gap-toothed, with an eternally red - carrot - nose. It was even surprising what the portly, hawk-eyed widow Borovaya found in him. Be that as it may, Parshin remained with her forever. It was rumored that the widow, an ambulance for reprisal, sometimes beat him when, holding on to the fences, he appeared before her menacing eyes in an indecent form.

He was a master of all trades: he could carpenter, carpenter, shoemaker, laid stoves in huts, slaughtered cattle, poultry, rabbits. He sewed mittens and winter hats from dressed fur.

We have Amanita replaced rotten frames. He worked slowly, in detail - for a month, at least, fussed with this matter. It was then and there that I got to know him. He was short, stocky, with almost no teeth, which was probably why he rarely smiled. True, when he was very drunk, a toothless smile of a baby appeared on his face. Almost always went overgrown with whitish stubble with a reddish tint. It was difficult to determine the age of Amanita: he could be given and fifty and all seventy, who cares how much. He himself claimed that he was forty-nine, and for how many years I knew him, he was always forty-nine.

Amanita immediately established cool relations with Karai. My dog ​​didn't like drinking people. Amanita loved to tease Karay. Apparently, he was bored alone baling with an ax and shuffling with a planer, and he had long conversations with the dog. While he was grinding all sorts of nonsense, Karay still endured, but as soon as he began to breathe fumes at him, poke a clumsy finger in his nose and pull his beard, calling him a dense grandfather, the dog was indignant and went into the booth, grumbling resentfully. But the stubborn little man did not lag behind, put his hardened hand into the kennel and pulled out Karay by his thick fluffy paws. Here the dog could not stand it: he growled loudly in his face, grabbed his hands with his teeth, but rather carefully. This irritated the fly agaric even more. He, opening his toothless mouth - however, he still had about a dozen teeth growing at random and at random - laughed loudly, indignant Karay. In the end, he jumped into the corridor, and from there, along a narrow, steep staircase, he climbed with difficulty to my attic. He opened the door with his nose and lay down under the wooden table at which I worked, and grumbled indignantly for a long time, complaining about the Amanita.

Despite all the troubles caused to him, one day Karay saved Leshka Parshin from certain death. It happened during a hot summer. Fly agaric in the company of friends took a walk on the banks of the narrow river Ladyzhenka. Huge rare pines grow in this picturesque place on a flat meadow. In mushroom autumn, right in the withered grass, you can pick strong boletus mushrooms. During the summer holidays, the villagers always arrange public festivities here. It was in the evening. Drinking companions gradually dispersed to their homes. And how it happened that he stuck his bald head into the river, neither he nor anyone else knows - whether he wanted to drink, or to refresh his buzzing head. But be that as it may, he ended up in the river, only his feet in tarpaulin boots remained on the shore. And although it was shallow here, and in general, as they say, the whole river is knee-deep, Lyoshka choked and, shaking his legs, calmed down. Somehow Karay ended up here - I have already said that he enjoyed unlimited freedom in Kuzhenkino. Seeing that the fly agaric was almost finished, the dog tried to pull him out of the river by his feet, but, having pulled off one boot, he abandoned this idea. He took another unsuccessful attempt: he grabbed his pants and, resting his paws on loose sand, dragged him. He tore his pants off Amanita almost to half, but he himself could not even budge. Then Karay sat down next to the choking poor fellow and howled heart-rendingly. The guys passing along the edge of the forest heard this terrible howl and ran to the river. They dragged out the immovable Amanita and pumped it out with difficulty. He then, presumably, jokingly, claimed that a bucket of “ruff” poured out of him: the water inside was mixed with vodka!

And in the village after this incident they said that God himself protects the drunk. God is God, but Leshka Parshin Karay saved. It would seem that after this incident, the Fly Agaric will change its attitude towards the dog - no matter how it is! Still attached to him, teased. And he even came up with such a joke: he pinched Karay's head with one hand, and with the other he put a bottle with the remains of red wine in his mouth. Seeing this once, I reprimanded him. “There is no one to drink with! - Amanita justified himself. But dogs, they can. They say that there are people in the city who hang around beer stalls in the morning ... "

I must say that my dog ​​absolutely did not tolerate the violence of one living being over another. I knew this better than anyone. When I still had a family and I had to speak strictly with my son, Karay immediately intervened, began to step on me, growl, show fangs. And if my wife ran into me - and this happened - he immediately stood between us, showing with his whole appearance that he would not tolerate a scandal in the house. Moreover, when he saw on the street that an angry mother was waving at her delinquent child, Karay ran into her and barked furiously.

This property of Karay became the reason that one day he nevertheless grabbed Amanita by the hand - hard and for nothing. My uncle, a pensioner - he has been raising rabbits for many years in the summer - asked Amanita to slaughter one for the holiday. Accustomed to such things, Parshin pulled the animal out of the cage, grabbed it by its hind legs and swung to hit it on the head with a mallet. At that very moment, dog fangs dug into Amanita's wrist. Leshka, taken aback, dropped his stick and released the rabbit. Karai grabbed the ill-fated murder weapon and, running aside, began with a furious growl to crush it into small pieces with his fangs.

Of course, he did not save the life of the rabbit, but he angered his uncle and Amanita very much.

7
Airedales are by nature hunting dogs. True, they perfectly combine this quality with guard service. And one of the ancestors of my Karai - this is noted in the pedigree - discovered one and a half thousand mines in the Leningrad region: he walked ahead of the sappers, lowering his nose-mine detector into the ground, and found wooden German mines that you cannot detect with the apparatus.

Natural instinct is a powerful force. Airedale Terriers and Fox Terriers (and indeed all terriers) are specialists in animals that live in holes. Karay could not indifferently pass by any hole. He stopped, started sniffing, then digging. He dug the earth with powerful front paws, and pushed it to the sides with his hind legs. And he worked quickly, deftly, like an earth-moving machine. It's interesting to watch a burrowing dog. It happens that almost all of it climbs into a hole - only its tail sticks out from there. It is for this “handle” that the fox terrier hunter pulls out of the hole. And he, in turn, drags a fox or a badger behind him, tightly clinging to his scruff or neck.

Karay and I often walked through the Kuzhenkinsky forests. They were all over the place. Immediately behind the former club, a pure pine forest began. You will cross the railway track, after Ryabinovik - another forest, more deaf and already dense. This forest is interspersed with birch groves and cranberry swamps. There is more litter in the mixed forest than in the forest. Somehow, about six years ago, there was a heavy snowfall, and then a storm broke out. And hundreds, thousands of young trees died. Foresters are gradually clearing the rubble, but in the wilderness you can still often find intertwined half-rotted trunks of thick and thin trees. In such places there are always a lot of woodpeckers - ordinary motley and large black ones with a red tuft.

It was in such a cluttered gloomy forest that Karay discovered a fox hole. It would seem that a city dog, who has lived most of his life far from the forest, how does he know how to act in such cases? However, Karai knew that he had