Barry Read Online Free

looked up at Michel, sat down on my haunches, and whined far back in my throat.
    “What’s the matter, Barry?” said Michel. “It’s a beautiful summer day in the mountains and, foronce, there’s not a patch of snow in sight.”
    My point exactly! Where is the snow?
I had waited all my young life to see the snow and now it was nowhere to be found. What was the meaning of this?
    “Don’t worry, Barry,” said Michel. “Enjoy the mild weather while you can. The snow will be here before you know it.”

    And that is what Phoebe and Jupiter and I did for the next few weeks. Every morning, after the clerics had finished singing, we followed Michel outside into the hospice yard. We played out of doors all day long. We sniffed the wind. We barked at the brown ptarmigans. We chased the furry, fleet mountain hares. We rolled in the grass. And when we weren’t chasing hares or birds, we were chasingeach other up one slope and down another, our playful yips and barks echoing off the rocks of the pass.
    At the end of each day, Michel would appear at the door of the hospice and call us. Then we would come running. One day when Michel called us, I did not come. I was busy stalking a hare. I had my nose to the ground, following the trail of scent the hare had left. I went around and around and finally I came to a chink in the rocks.
    “Barry!” Michel called.
    The hare was beneath those rocks. I knew it. I poked my nose into the hole and got a powerful whiff of hare.
Sorry, Michel, but I am busy with a hare just now
, I growled, never taking my eyes off the hole. My thought was:
Michel will understand
.
    But Michel did not understand. “Barry!” he said again in a very stern voice. “I don’t care whatyou are doing. When I call you, you will come. That is what we call obedience.”
    I gave a snort. What was obedience? Was it a hare? Was it a bird or a beetle or a nice bush twig to chew on? What did I care about obedience?
    The next thing I knew, Michel was standing over me. He reached down and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, just like Mother did. I was a big dog now, coming up almost to my mother’s shoulder, but he picked me up all the same. He was strong!
    “Barry, you will stop whatever you are doing and come to me when I call,” he said. He shook me, not hard, but just enough to get my attention. Then he dropped me. I fell in a furry heap. His face was cold and angry.
    I put my tail between my legs and looked up at him, and my expression said,
I am all for obedience,Michel. From now on, when you call, I will come
.
    And I did. Whenever I heard Michel or any of the other clerics or marronniers calling my name, I came. Michel and the others were always so happy to see me that I was glad I had.
    Toward the end of the summer, I noticed that my fur coat was getting thicker. I wondered why that was. Then one early morning, while it was still dark outside, I found out the reason. I was in the cellar, fast asleep, when something made me open my eyes. Everything was silent, quieter than I had ever heard it. Has that ever happened to you? That a silence, rather than some noise, wakes you up in the middle of the night?
    I went over to the door and sniffed between the cracks. I smelled snow. While the other dogs slept on, I got up and pushed through the door. I ran up the cellar stairs, along the hall, and down the frontsteps, my claws scritch-scratching on the stones. When I came to the front door, I lifted a paw and banged at it. Brother Henri came. It was his turn to stay by the door all night to greet travelers who might arrive. “Are you ready for your first snow, Barry?” he whispered, grinning.
    He opened the door and let me out.
    How can I describe what it was like to see the world I knew—the hospice, the storage sheds, the rocky walls of the pass, the meadow where my brother and sister and I had played all summer, the bush, even the lake—all cloaked in a layer of pure white?
    And the silence! We dogs have very